from June 11, 2020
In 2020, everyone is either a collaborator or a dissident.
Everything is about power. Everything has to have a side. Everyone knows what side they should pick. Pick it—and you're a collaborator. Reject it—a dissident.
Nor are these labels chosen to mean that dissidents are always right, and collaborators always wrong. Far from it.
In 2020, everyone is relevant. In 2020, anyone can be important. In 2020, anyone's ideas can spread around the world in seconds.
In 1990, this was exactly what we wanted. In 1990, anyone with a Usenet account could see the future perfectly. In 1990, you didn't even need to be John Perry Barlow.
In 2020, the network would be the government. For the first time, direct democracy would scale. In 2020, everyone would be their own representative in some planetary assembly. In 2020, we would have real democracy: routed over TCP/IP to everything on Planet Three with two legs that wasn't a bird.
And in 2020, everyone would be relevant. A new dream? Not even slightly. In 1842, Tennyson had pretty much the same vision:
In a total state, everyone and everything is infused with power. Everyone matters. Everything is important. Everyone has to care. Everyone wants to change the world. Everyone must be engaged. Everyone is pushing power forward, or pushing back against it. Everyone is either a collaborator or a dissident. Power has turned the whole country into a political cult.
Anyone who reads Vaclav Havel's Power of the Powerless will be struck by Havel's portrait of Czechoslovakia forty years ago—with its voluntary window-slogans; its endless parade of crusades; its inexorable machinery of human cancellation.
Havel had the right strategy for the subjects of the total state. First, they must teach themselves to be powerless. They must fully inhabit their private irrelevance. Above all, they must stop trying to change the world.
Whatever power they think they now have, it is power in a fantasy. Until they check out of this fantasy, they are powerless in reality—and this is true even of the most successful people in the world today.
Engagement is any voluntary relationship with power—to assist or resist power, whether in action or just desire. If you are trying to change the world—even if you just want to change it—maybe even if you just want it to change—you are engaged.
The opposite of engagement is detachment. To be detached is to be consciously irrelevant—to inhabit the world as it is, to know that it is likely to continue on its current path, and to separate yourself from any action or desire to change it. No one can achieve perfect detachment—which is the point of trying.
Achieving detachment has both individual and collective benefits. It is good for you, if you can do it. It is good for everyone, if everyone can do it.
We'll see how that works as we move forward. But Havel, ten years later, was President of Czechoslovakia. The irony of detachment: it's the first step on the one path to a different government. And while that path is long, this first step may be the hardest.
Modern civilization, thanks to innovations in communication from Gutenberg to Pornhub, has returned to its beginning. In 2020, everyone is totally connected. So everyone can and must be engaged with power—just like when we were chimps.
Systematic mendacity and poor governance are common comorbidities. The closer a regime feels itself to death, the worse its behavior must become. The worse its behavior gets, the closer it comes to death—and the harder it must work to look good. And every regime, to almost everyone, looks absolutely immortal till the day it dies.
When we all eat donuts all the time, we all get fat. When we all feel important all the time, our government becomes dysfunctional and often actively vicious. And socially and even professionally, we all start behaving like Robespierre's teenage girlfriend.
A bad regime is insecure, with low or inconsistent performance; it must constantly engineer public opinion. A good regime is highly secure, with predictable high performance; at most it must now and then nudge its fickle subjects toward reality. War is not peace; hate is not love; but security, not anarchy, is freedom.
We can solve this problem in a simple, painless way: by revising our vocabulary. Let’s just consider dissidents as a special kind of collaborator. We can call collaborators who aren’t dissidents volunteers. The difference becomes the collaborator’s polarity; volunteers are positive and dissidents are negative.
All regimes are like fairies: they exist if people believe in them. They all specialize in processing faith into sovereignty. This factory can process more than one kind of belief—in more than one kind of way. Pound for pound, our regime probably draws more energy from its opponents than its supporters.
So everyone should disengage. Volunteers should disengage; they are probably just propping up a bad government. Dissidents should disengage; they are probably also just propping up a bad government.
And there really is only one kind of collaborator—just two different brands, each crafted lovingly by evolution’s inhuman hand for a different culture or personality. Both sides are objectively supporting power—which is why power is so strong.
Power is fun; power is a burden. Over time, fun decreases and burden increases. One day, the regime falls peacefully, even joyously—as soon as it has some next regime it can surrender to. And designing that regime is neither dissidence nor volunteering.