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We’ve become accustomed to asking: is 2020 the start of a great change? And it’s clear we can’t answer that question without thinking about the future of capitalism.
That’s what this week’s essay seeks to do. Specifically, it takes aim at a much-repeated but little-examined idea: that we live inside a kind of economic and cultural after-time, which we call late-stage capitalism. I wonder whether that’s really true. In the essay, I float a new way to judge how far into the evolution of capitalism we’ve travelled.
Also, a little innovation when it comes to this newsletter. Two changes, both designed to to ensure you can quickly draw maximum value from New World Same Humans.
First, I’m adding a new permanent section at the top called Fast Download. This is a bullet-point summary of the argument made in the essay below. Time is precious, so think of this section as the default read and a way to download the core ideas into your brain as quickly as possible. The bold headers used in Fast Download are repeated in the essay, meaning you can easily skip to the relevant section if you want all the details.
Second, the regular snippets section will now become a separate email – delivered every Wednesday. The format stays the same: new stories and super-fast analysis.
So NWSH now becomes the Sunday essay and the Wednesday news. Enjoy! And more announcements coming soon.
📥 Fast Download: The future of capitalism and the last machine
💰Modernity made us rich. We can think of capitalism as a project to serve our material needs. It succeeded. Today, we’re rich beyond the wildest dreams of our great-grandparents. Our prosperity fuels the idea that we live in late-stage capitalism.
🤔 But are we happy? In 2020, material abundance has freed us to obsess over our higher-order needs: happiness, creativity, status, meaning.
🙏 The next capitalism is coming for your soul. These higher-order needs represent a vast open playing field for capitalism. So far, it’s had little to say about them. That leaves capitalism plenty of work left to do. Maybe it’s not late-stage at all.
🙋♀️ Future capitalism is more virtual and more human. How will capitalism move into this open space? New technologies will take direct aim at our higher-order needs: think virtual companions and simulated worlds. Meanwhile, a new economy of human connection will flourish.
✨ An Experience Machine is the last machine capitalism needs to make. So when does capitalism end? One playful answer: capitalism reaches its end-point when it builds a magic box able to serve every preference we can ever imagine. An Experience Machine. Can VR be that box? Maybe, but we’re a long way from that right now.
👻 Capitalism may have a ghostly afterlife. A caveat. Even if we build the magic box, people may still value real experiences. This raises the possibility of a strange afterlife for capitalism.
⌛Thinking about ends. Thinking about capitalism as a journey towards the Experience Machine allows us new perspectives on its nature and evolution. It poses a challenge to the idea that we should understand ourselves as living inside late-stage capitalism. If we can better understand capitalism, we are more able to improve it or replace it as we see fit.
💰 Modernity made us rich
To understand the future of capitalism, first rewind to its origins. That story is closely bound to another: the story of modernity.
In the relatively recent past, most people owned almost nothing. We can think of modernity as a project to transform that state of affairs. To move from the overriding fact of human life back then, which was scarcity, to the situation we inhabit now, which is abundance.
So modernity was a project aimed first at our material needs: for food, houses, clothes, tools, and basic kinds of comfort. Three interrelated handmaidens of that shift were crucial. The industrial revolution vastly increased the productive capacity of the human collective. The global north exploited the people and resources of the global south. Capitalism incentivised a new class of producers and ignited relentless innovation.
And here we are. In 2020, we moderns are rich, healthy and safe beyond the wildest imaginings of our great-grandparents. As a project to serve our material needs, modernity has been a stunning success. This material abundance does much to fuel the idea that we live in late-stage capitalism – that we are nearing the stage where capitalism must exhaust itself, and flame out.
Unsurprisingly, getting rich has also changed us.
🤔 But are we happy?
By liberating us from the struggle for subsistence and basic comfort, modernity freed us to focus instead on a set of different, higher-order needs. Think happiness, creativity, status, and the search for spiritual meaning.
Of course, medieval peasants also wanted to be happy. But we lucky inhabitants of modernity are able to devote vastly more time, energy and resources to the quest to serve our highest selves.
Indeed, in 2020 billions inside modernity take the fulfilment of their material needs for granted. It’s an obsession with unfulfilled higher-order needs that defines their experience of daily life. For all our prosperity, we’re haunted by a set of peculiarly modern questions. Am I joyful? Do I love well? What do I believe?
🙏 The next capitalism is coming for your soul
It’s significant, then, that so far capitalism has had relatively little to say to those questions.
The advertising industry evolved in the early 20th-century as an attempt to link ordinary consumption to higher-order needs. Buy this car and you’ll get the girl!Use this washing powder and you’ll feel overwhelming contentment! It was never that convincing.
Meanwhile, the focus of our consumption shifted towards services, experiences and information. That shift, towards a materially abundant and experience-focused economy, is much of what people mean when they talk about late-stage capitalism. But even this capitalism leaves much higher terrain – around happiness, creativity, status, good relationships, and meaning – largely untouched.
Higher-order human needs, then, are a vast, open playing field. Seen this way, capitalism has plenty of space to move into. But how can it make that journey?
🙋♀️ Future capitalism is more virtual and more human
Two shifts suggest an answer to that question. This is where we can glimpse a concrete future path for capitalism.
First, new technologies are unlocking powerful new ways to serve our higher-order human needs in more direct ways than ever before. They are artificial intelligence, VR, AR, robotics and automation, and genetic tech. These technologies offer the promise of a new stage for capitalism: one that targets not the physical world around us, but the world inside us.
Think an AI-fuelled virtual entity that serves as a companion, counsellor, and even friend. New kinds of human cognitive and physical enhancements that elevate users above their peers and so deliver a real status hit. Or the emergence of virtual worlds that offer new kinds of relationships, experiences, and even spiritual meanings.
Of course, we’re some way from all that right now. But you can see faint glimpses of this new world emerging via AI-fuelled companion apps such as Replika, or the emergence of video games such as Fortnite as new domains of meaningful experience.
The second shift is one founded on the changing nature of value in an automated economy. Think about the future of capitalism and we tend to think most about global corporations and futuristic technologies. But what if a crucial part of the picture is local, individual, and human?
As we head deeper into the 21st-century we’re building automated economies that can be stunningly productive with ever-less human input. In such a world, what remains for us to do? The answer is: what the machines cannot. Care for one another. Entertain one another. Truly see each other.
In the decades ahead, work will shift towards these forms of human connection. New forms of value exchange will emerge, in which people will work to entertain and care for the people around them, to make them less lonely, to nurture their creativity, to fill their lives with meaning.
✨ An Experience Machine is the last machine capitalism needs to make
The next capitalism as I outline it, then, is aimed not primarily at our bodies but at our souls.
That leaves it a lot of work to do. And that, in turn, throws our tendency to talk about late-stage capitalism into a new light. What if capitalism is only just getting started?
Some people will shudder at the idea; others will be delighted. But is there any way we can take a judgement on how far along we are in the journey of capitalism? Is that even a meaningful question? Here’s one playful answer.
We can think of capitalism as a machine for serving human preferences. That, at heart, is its brilliance. It relentlessly matches preferences, or I wants, with people who can serve those preferences, or I haves.
This metaphor offers us a new way of thinking about capitalism’s end point, or its telos. Because if capitalism is a machine for serving preferences, then it could come to its logical conclusion by building another such machine. Capitalism can conclude itself by building a magic box able to give us everything we could ever want.
The American philosopher Robert Nozick famously imagined just such a box (though he put it to use in a quite different argument). Nozick called it the Experience Machine: a device able to simulate, with perfect verisimilitude so that it is indistinguishable from real life, any experience we can imagine. Want to be a rock star and play in front of 80,000 people? The Experience Machine can deliver. Want to swim with dolphins, eat the perfect steak, have the perfect relationship? Just hop into the machine. Want the perfect life? Then live in the machine.
The Nozickean Experience Machine, like capitalism, exists to serve human preferences. If capitalism was able to produce such a machine, it would be the last thing it would ever have to make.
Today, Nozick’s Experience Machine reminds us of something: virtual reality. Technologists are working to build immersive, convincing simulated worlds that really will be able to deliver the experiences of our dreams.
So if we want to know how close we are to the logical end-point of capitalism, one way to think about that is: how close are we to an Experience Machine?
No one can give a definitive answer. But right now we’re not close – and most likely very far – from anything like it.
👻 Capitalism may have a ghostly afterlife
If the end-point of capitalism is a Nozickean Experience Machine, then we’re a long way from that end.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the practise of capitalism will last a long time. We might collectively decide to bring the story to a close when it’s only part of the way through.
Still, our distance from such a machine does pose a challenge to the idea that we should understand ourselves as living inside late-stage capitalism. And it also offers the us the possibility of a new, teleological history of our system; one that tells the story of capitalism’s evolution towards the Experience Machine.
One caveat:
Robert Nozick concluded his discussion of the Experience Machine by suggesting that no one would want to live inside one. That is, says Nozick, because it’s not just experiences that we value; we also want to think that our experiences are real – whatever that means. If and when we do develop a VR Experience Machine, will people still place a lower value on the experiences it delivers? Does that possibility raise the spectre of an encore, a kind of ghostly afterlife, for capitalism?
To be seen.
⌛ Thinking about ends
Each of us is a universe of infinite preferences – hopes, dreams, desires – contained within a finite physical being. It’s that above all, I think, that imposes on life the slightly absurd aspect that we all sense, even during its most serious moments. It’s a kind of cosmic joke: to be so much, instantiated in this world by so little.
Thinking about capitalism as a journey towards the magic, preference-serving box that is the Experience Machine allows us new perspectives on its nature and evolution.
I don’t offer those perspectives to argue that we should continue to practice capitalism in its current form, or in any form. But simply so that we can better understand it and bend it to our ends, or replace it if we wish.
We may still be in the infancy of capitalism. How does that make us feel?
Network effects
Thanks for reading this week.
We may be a long way from the Experience Machine, but together we’re building something almost as exciting. That is, a community dedicated to understanding our shared future – and to mutual empowerment, support and inspiration. Each one of us is a valuable node in the growing New World Same Humans network.
Behind the scenes, the NWSH team is working hard to take this community to the next stage. There’s one thing you can do to help. Link up more people!
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Your membership of our community is so appreciated. I’ll be back next Sunday; until then, be well.
David.
RE
"💰Modernity made us rich. We can think of capitalism as a project to serve our material needs. It succeeded. Today, we’re rich beyond the wildest dreams of our great-grandparents. Our prosperity fuels the idea that we live in late-stage capitalism"
"We" as in The West?
I.e. not much in the context of the Global Goals; even Paul Polman, former Unilever CEO, made the point during preparations for COP21 in Paris; it's more or less irrelevant, what the West undertakes to achieve Global Goals; "We" are irrelevant for the Whole.
Reminds me; Tomas Björkman and his book "The World we Create"; i.e. even the market today is not free; it's very much designed indeed and we need to redesign. I.e. not black / white capitalism/anti-capitalism (WHICH IS SO BORING); rather a metamodernistic approach; i.e. what works? What does it mean to be human? Let's do it!
https://www.amazon.com/World-We-Create-God-Market-ebook/dp/B07YNRLTVQ
https://medium.com/the-abs-tract-organization/the-world-we-re-creating-a531608f16c3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qibKJObS7so
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEsADtSCrTs