Silicon Valley Monarchism Discourse
[In response to various threads between @discoursedrome and @balioc . I don’t agree, like, at all with Balioc, but his opponents are misreading these claims in ways I find pretty willfully dense. So I’m going to go into the subject.]
I saw on my dash something about the pervasive spyware tools the CIA has, even more ubiquitous than you had previously thought, as revealed by wikileaks. I yawned because even though I am a terrible piece of trash who is guilty of many sins, both real and thoughtcrimes, I expect it to have zero effect on me. It’s bad yes, but bad in an abstract way.
If you told me my employer’s IT guy, or the local policeman I see at Dunkin, had these tools, I would lose my shit. And I suspect this is the natural reaction many people would have.
“The sky is high and the Emperor is far away” as the old Chinese proverb goes. What goes on in our personal sphere – that of neighbors and their close relations – matters to all of us in a way we find difficult to express on tumblr and viral media. If we have power over people close to us, it is basically impossible to not let that warp our interactions. And if they have power over us, even more so, as we toe the line of politeness and humility to get them to not use that power to hurt us. Even saints have to work hard to resist this all-consuming bias, and they rarely succeed.
The blessing of a distant, lecorbussian ruler, is that they do not actually care about us and our servility to them. They don’t even know us. So they make sweeping judgments based on abstract rules that barely apply to our situation, which may be good or bad, but at least they aren’t doing it on the basis of whether we invited them to our party, or if we’re dating their ex-girlfriend.
Now, one would prefer a ruler who is local enough to know the details necessary to come up with contextually appropriate solutions, but who also does not demand you treat them well on a personal level, or favor the various local bullies who already inflict tyranny on you. But that is rather difficult to achieve.
What Balioc is advocating for here is a ruler intelligent enough to know our context, and distant enough to not care except in the sense of maximizing some public utility function. This has never been achieved in human history, but it is at least one and only one problem to solve. There’s an appeal to that, particularly if you look at the fiasco of American federalism.
And spiritually, I do not think he is far off in his desires from the sort of Just Political Deity many people search for in their vague language. Conservatives desire One True Constitution that can resolve all our disputes while holding no partiality because it died over two hundred years ago. And the rationalists are known for talking about an AI god who will basically perform the same function. It’s not the dream of an infinitely benevolent god who knows the smallest details of your life and loves you for them… it’s someone with enough power and enough disinterest to practice benign neglect. Might as well call it the Invisible Hand.
In the simplest terms, remember how “freedom” is always expressed on a limitation on someone else, to stop you from doing something. The populist-monarchism alliance has always been based on “I want the central actor to have the power to control the closer tyrants from exercising their power over me.” That’s the case for every labor regulation, the aforementioned Constitution, CPS, and on and on. You can frame almost every demand for freedom as demand for a stronger, more central tyrant somewhere along the line.
I personally try to bow out of political arguments that are basically over “which level of the power hierarchy gets the freedom”, but most people still get caught up in them, and for those “Silicon Valley Monarchism” is a pretty intuitive and simple solution to that particular knot.
for those “Silicon Valley Monarchism” is a pretty intuitive and simple solution to that particular knot.
“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
The problem (well, one of many problems, but for me the central one) with Silicon Valley Monarchism is that it’s attempting to solve a complex problem (how to govern in a world where people have differing incentives and will fight to increase their or their tribes’ wealth or status in ways that are globally suboptimal) by defining it away. People love to define away problems, because that’s so much easier than arguing: “by definition, you’re wrong” takes one second and no effort, compared to the heavy lifting of a real argument. And that’s what SV monarchism is: there’s no need to work out the messy details of who gets to have power over what, because by definition it’s this dude with the crown. It’s innately appealing to the engineer mind, which hisses and recoils in disgust at those messy “people problems”. Which is why it tends to be one possible pathway for SV-types, along with libertarianism (where the messy people problems are defined away as “the market will fix it”) or Singularitarianism (defined away as “the AI will fix it”).
But have you ever conceded an argument because your opponent pulled the “you’re wrong by definition” card? No, you haven’t. Nobody has. This is why the Sequences have an entire chapter warning against these “by definition” arguments: they never work. And this is why I’m skeptical of your point that “at least there’s only one problem to solve” under monarchism. Nobody post-Enlightenment believes in the legitimacy of monarchies (with actual power, not powerless constitutional figureheads) except these NRx weirdos. People might agree with a monarch as long as this person is making decisions in their favor, but as soon as there’s a decision they don’t like, and there’s a crisis.
Hence, liberal democracy. Things won’t always go in your favor, but at least (the theory goes), when they go against you, you should understand that it was because your fellow man also has interests, and in this case they just didn’t align with yours. When a monarch rules against you, why not guillotine him? What makes his decision worth anything?
It’s like saying that Communism has “only one problem”: how to allocate resources efficiently in the absence of capital markets. Yeah, it’s only one problem, but it’s a huge fucking problem that nobody has successfully demonstrated how to solve. If you think you’ve got the answer, fine, but I’m going to default to a position of “extreme skepticism bordering on summary dismissal”.
I swear, in the sight of all who are reading this, that this is the last I am going to say about this topic. For a long time, at least. But it’s worth responding to this.
No, it’s not “defining the problem away.” I mean, it could be that thing, if you’re very stupid and you assume that giving someone monarchical power is going to be enough to prevent any problems all by itself. But in fact it is deliberately choosing to engage with a certain set of difficult political problems over dealing with a different set of difficult political problems, on the grounds that the first set seems easier and more tractable.
If you want a successful system where political power is very centralized and where its users are mostly unaccountable to anyone – which is to say, a monarchy, or anything remotely resembling one – there are two giant hurdles that you have to clear in order to get anywhere real.
1. How do you ensure that the “monarch” (or equivalent) is well-meaning and capable, that it will promote beneficial policies and enact/enforce them sensibly? The most common objection to monarchical-type systems is “sometimes you get a bad king and then everything is terrible,” and it’s true.
As far as I can tell, this is much the lesser concern, and I have lots of bright-if-presently-half-baked ideas for dealing with it. Selecting and training capable, virtuous people is a thing to which we have devoted lots and lots and lots of intelligence and effort. If the fate of the world depends on being able to hire one or ten or a hundred really top-notch employees…well, given what alternative challenges are likely to look like, I’d take that one in a heartbeat.
2. How do we provide the “monarchy” with the widespread acceptance and popular legitimacy that it would require to be tolerably stable? This one is a genuinely hard question, and a tremendously important one, and the fact that I don’t have a really satisfying answer is why I’m occasionally making casual reference to these ideas on Tumblr instead of trying to make my career as a political thinker.
But.
A lot of people seem convinced that democracy is just naturally, inherently better-able to accrue legitimacy than are other forms of government. This attitude strikes me as both implausible-on-its-face and not-remotely-backed-up-by-history.
There is possibly something resonant to the notion that “you have to agree to the rules that bind you, and if the government doesn’t take your viewpoint into account, it can’t legitimately tell you what to do.” No democracy larger than ancient Athens has ever actually offered that thing. As an American (for example), you do not get to “be heard” in any meaningful sense, and everyone fucking knows it. You get to choose between the lesser of two fairly disgusting options, which are put in place by the machinations of fathomlessly huge systems that take no more notice of your thoughts and desires than you do of an ant’s. And even that choice means relatively little compared to the workings of the various bureaucracies, agencies, armies, courts, etc., which march on and do their thing and punish people without any kind of democratic control that anyone could call meaningful with a straight face. A modern democracy is rule-by-unaccountable-tyrants as much as any monarchy, they’re just selected differently. And this is no secret. People in democracies do not feel very enfranchised. No one thinks that the cops, let alone the men in suits in Washington, answer to his demands. Sometimes this infuriates them, sometimes they accept it, but they sure as hell know it.
Now, I want to be very clear – despite everything I just said, democracy is presently blessed with amazing powers of social legitimacy, at least in the “West.” The results of elections are not seriously disputed. Military coups don’t really happen. It’s like a miracle. This is the single best argument for maintaining democracy, possibly the only convincing argument for maintaining democracy.
Why is it the case?
It’s a meme. Influential philosophers spent a couple of centuries saying “democracy is the people’s power and so democratic governments are inherently legitimate,” various large popular movements picked it up, it was embedded in the cultural DNA of some very successful countries, and now it’s part of our civilization. It doesn’t have any especial connection to the actual traits of democracy, any more than “Harvard is the best college” has anything to do with people knowing anything about the faculty or curriculum at Harvard.
That meme could have been something else. At various times and places it was something else – there have been long periods of stability under non-democratic regimes. And it could be something else again, if the circumstances were right, if the right philosophies caught on. I don’t know how to do that. If I did, I’d be talking about this a lot more and a lot more loudly.
Blood monarchy is such a terrible idea precisely because heredity doesn’t have the power to engender that kind of legitimacy, and so “why don’t we depose the dynasty and go with a different noble line?” is always an open question. There are alternatives.