I reference and revisit and reuse this tweet a lot so I figured I might as well do a blogpost about it. It’s been surprising to me how popular it is with people.
I could say that “it’s because it communicates a vision as a series of progressive steps”, which is technically true, but doesn’t actually explain why people like it. I suppose it’s preferable to even vaguer promises to reach some grand outcome without any intermediate steps. That said, I’m not under any illusions here: the vision here is vague too. I don’t think there’s much point in spending too much time and energy obsessing about what exactly “shift in global consciousness” means. (Although I do have some riffs on that. Public education, etc. But I don’t think I want to get into that right now.)
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Wanna think some naive thoughts out loud:
1. most billionaires basically have the bulk of their money tied up in the value of their assets, right?
2. and the general consensus amongst people who don’t like billionaires is that they should be taxed more, to “give back to society”
3. thing is, governments aren’t exactly efficient or effective in the way they spend tax money. even singapore’s govt, I think, despite all the praise it gets, is nowhere as efficient as it could be. this seems to be a fundamental, structural thing.
4. so far the options we have for “give back to society” are
- “pay more tax” (aka get the govt to allocate your resources for you),
- “do more capitalism” (yay market failures),
- “do charity” (often underwhelming results)
Basically I think my frame is something like, I’m not a fan of how billionaires deploy $, and I’m not a fan of how governments deploy $ either. Ot feels like there should be a 3rd option that’s smarter, more dynamic, more transparent, more inclusive.
I think if there’s something new it might emerge from local mutual aid networks that then network together. A lot of the status quo is built and modelled on archaic communication systems and it feels like we are due for a bottom-up reimagining.
Silly thought experiment: Like, what if governments *and* billionaires all vanished overnight and we had to restart everything from scratch? In my simplistic model, I think there may be some anarchy for a while, and/but then things would pretty quickly coalesce into local clusters for safety + network effects. Then local chieftains, warlords, militias, etc would broker alliances and eventually you get something somewhat akin to the status quo, but maybe it would be less clunky and inefficient. or maybe it would be worse, LOL. idk.
I don’t like the following phrases:
charity
philanthropy
wealth distribution
my gut tells me that all of these are the wrong frames and that they are all doomed to fail or get stuck by default. I can’t be sure there’s another way, but I’m even less sure that there isn’t.
The way I think about this at the smallest scale – as an individual, re: my friends and family, then people I care about, is – first achieve personal autonomy, then help everyone around you achieve the same, then encourage people to pay it forward.
I don’t know, I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m probably wrong about everything. I’m just trying to imagine a better way of being, and put my money/time/energy where my mouth is.
To kind of swerve hard on a tangent, I feel a substantial part of the problem is low-trust environments, and if so, a substantial part of the solution will require incubating high-trust environments (or high-trust networks), which might be really small in the early days.
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Other domino memes I’ve made:
SG
Twitter: