Our Post-Capitalist Response to COVID-19

Humanity's response to COVID-19 highlights protoexamples of our transition to Post-Capitalism. These four areas are:

• Networkism
• Coherent Pluralism
• Bentoism
• Generosity

I've recorded a video about COVID and these four areas here:

You can see my Roam Research page with links, here.

Please let me know if you have any feedback!

Transcript

Transcript is below. If you want to listen with the transcript, I highly recommend using this Otter.ai link instead of just scrolling below. https://otter.ai/s/Pxpj2UxJS02hHaAE3ju3Lg

Hello, everybody. So my name is Rhys Lindmark. And I'm trying out this youtuber thing. I've done a lot of podcasting and have a podcast with like 150,000 plays, which is cool, but i think that i think that I'm a YouTuber, or at least I'm gonna see if I am a YouTuber. So that is the journey that you're going on today. And so what we're talking about today is post capitalism and Coronavirus. So thinking about how the current Coronavirus and COVID-19 stuff is affecting society, especially looking at the lens of post capitalism and kind of what that how we can use that lens to understand what's happening.

So when I talk about post capitalism, I'm talking about four kind of separate ideas. Lots of people talking about post capitalism in different ways, right. And I think that there's, you know, there's not that much thought about what happens everybody knows like, oh God, we're at the end of late stage capitalism. You At the end of capitalism, but no one really knows what's next. And so, for me post capitalism, it means different things to different people. But for me, it means these four things.
Networkism, coherent pluralism, bentoism, and generosity. And we're going to look at how each of those things kind of shows up with Coronavirus. It gives you a feeling for what each of those mean.
So let's talk about this first one first. Networkism. And network ism is honestly one of the most simple ones. I'm just pulling up my notes here. Um, network ism is just the idea that we have. We're, you know, moving from something like, you know, the centralized networks where you have some kind of Central you have a bunch of people going through, you know, one centralized platform versus something like a decentralized network, which has multiple different nodes that are all connecting to each other. So that's kind of the transition that we're talking about. And you can see this in a lot of ways This is mostly enabled by digital technology now that we have 4 billion network smartphones and people on the internet, we can have things like Facebook and Airbnb and Uber. And we're also seeing this with, I mean, some of our biggest institutions like nation states and governments and banks and academic institutions that have these centralized trusted networks. They are moving or centralized, trusted institutions. They're moving towards this more networked approach or they're being competed with by some of these network first approaches.
So when we talk about network ism in the Coronavirus, I think that there are like highlight a couple different things here. And again, looking at my notes, I want to highlight a how these kind of from an institutional perspective what's happening with what I call like networked, organizations, networked organizations, networked orgs versus the state and then we're always I'm going to chat about, you know, the Yeah, a little bit about how those network orgs work with things like, we're going to talk a little bit about the capital side. So grants that's like the money piece. And then we're going to talk about the information piece. And so these are stuff like how the like influencers, the networked influencers, aka Twitter. Versus like mainstream media and SM, and this is instead of money, this is like the information side. So this is money and this is info. And the idea is that and then we're going to talk about one final thing, actually, which is, oh, we might change a little bit about the platforms how these social media platforms are responding. Or response and as you can tell, I'm almost running out of space here but that's okay.
So, this first one networked orcs versus the state idea here is you can see kind of proto examples of this with stuff like the Arab Spring and occupy wall street, digital. There's this great book called Twitter and tear gas. And it shows how digital technologies have allowed us to coordinate more easily across a bunch of different people to do things like the Arab Spring or do things like Occupy Wall Street, and these networked orgs they're kind of battling with existing institutions like the state. And so when you think about this, you can usually see the new networked orgs that exist with the Coronavirus response. There are a lot of them, and they're very exciting and interesting. Most of them are organized around hashtags and that's actually how network orders usually work is that they have usually kind of hashtag based put this up here.
So yeah, they're really hashtag bass and Some of the main hashtags that we've seen are like get us, pp. And that's this group of 75 Plus, that doesn't give 75 full time volunteers with a bunch of other people who are creating this marketplace and clearinghouse for getting medical professionals, personal protective equipment. And it is a group as what the way this works is there are a bunch of different subgroups that we're starting to be like, Oh, we want to get these folks equipment. And then they're starting to connect to each other and say, Hey, oh, you're trying to do this too. Great. We have this shared outcome. That's like combined together and they eventually all combined around this hashtag get SPP site, and now they have this great network where they get to, yeah, there's this cool there's this nationwide at least network of in the US, people talking to each other, saying here, I have PP who wants it, and then nurses and doctors being able to say hey, I need that pp. So, that is one example. There's also been stuff like the Other hashtags, like the masks for all is a recent one, masks for all. And these are folks who are like, hey, the who and the, the World Health Organization and the CDC in America have not been issuing these mask directives. And we think that it's probably best to have a mess even though of course, leave the 95 for the healthcare workers. And so masks for all of us this again, a group of folks who got together use this hashtag masks for all got people need like an API and they commoditize the ability to put masks on your profile picture. So it's easy to put masks on your profile picture and kind of spread that and kind of tried to say hey, and push and say, Hey, we need to get more masks. And then eventually now the CDC is like, oh, everybody should try to wear cloth masks to have to tell exactly how much masks for all had an impact on that. But this was kind of a bottom up network based organization that was doing this. I made a lot of other ones that was great one called Coronavirus tech Handbook, which was Based on no it's actually moderately interesting all right up here Coronavirus tech and book um, and the Coronavirus tech handbook was cool because it was based on there's a bunch of these co living houses and they're all part of networks within their cities like there's one in San Francisco called the hate street Commons. Then that network is part of this metal network called the embassy network. And the Coronavirus tech handbook was created by folks at one of the embassy networks in London, called Newspeak house. And you can just tell how because there is this existing without the existing capital of the existing network, bottom up network, decentralized capital of having this bottom of network of decentralized co living houses, it was able to spread pretty quickly because it was like, Oh, we have this new you know, Google Doc, essentially, anybody who wants to add to it can didn't even have common didn't even have. Everybody had edit permissions, which was crazy. It was like our slash place where everybody just did what they wanted. Like it worked out because people were not trying to troll or whatever. any case, this the tech Handbook, leverage the existing network of these co living houses in a really cool way. So that's another example. And that was not based around a hashtag for what it's worth. And so the there's this other one called ind coronavirus.org. Again, 5000 people on this Slack channel that are all trying out a bunch of different each, there's the ventilators, hash channel, there's the you know, pp channel, they're all trying like build stuff. At the same time. There's a 70,000 group 70,000 person group called COVID medical supplies, DIY COVID medical supplies. And yeah, it's just a bunch of folks who are making these medical supplies and trying to make them bottom up in their 3d printers in their homes and then trying to provide them then to get SPP stuff and so that's the beautiful that's Facebook group is pretty sweet. The 70,000 person Facebook group Yes, that's what this network response means. And when we talk about this network response,
you know, it is what I say about it is from a new institutional tech or new.
Was that called institutional? I'm sorry.
cusine theorems and institutional technologies, news out economics, new institutional economics, sorry. For new institutional economics perspective. These things are all based on all institutions are competing versus each other. nation states versus companies versus religions. And those things are competing with each other. These bottom up groups are also competing and you can imagine the main graph that showed for these things is motivation.
Versus coordination.
And you can think of motivation is money, while coordination is information and So different things have are more motivating or more coordinating and other things. And something like this showed up in the 1930s. I think with Coase with Ronald Coase, who said, Ah, why do we have with his book, The theory of the firm? There's like, why do we have both firms and markets, there's a cost because the firm is better at coordinating. But let's go to motivating while the market is really good at motivating with money as Lesko just like coordinating. And so you could think of the network these hashtag first, networked organizations as being as a net effect. He said in her book, Twitter tear gas, they're really good at coordinating the cost for coordination has gone down a bunch because we now have zero mark. Now that 4 billion people have a smartphone, the marginal cost for copying and duplicating information on the internet is zero. So you can really coordinate super super easily now. And so these groups are really good at coordinating really quickly. They're very resilient. They can come up quick. there let's get on motivation. They don't have the money baked in aspect. to them. But these hash tag based organizations are really good coordination. And the other thing is that the cost I imagine like a third axis here, the z axis of cost, the cost is really low. Right? When you think about something like me to, like, typing hashtag me to on the internet is a low cost. And so typing hashtag get SPP is low cost and allow people to kind of coordinate more easily and more quickly in response to these crises. So yeah, that's roughly speaking, what you can see here, there's of course, a big part of this theme is also how the state is responding. And the state is responding. I mean, different states responding different ways. And we're learning a lot about this. How much do you need to surveil your people? How much do you need a strong? Is it only, you know, authoritarian governments that can do this? Or can you do this with a strong democracy or whatever? And I think that there is, you know, in the United States where I'm based as most of my experience here And I think that you can both see some of the really slow, sad decrepit old institutional responses of just like, oh God, like, what is Trump doing? And like this does not look, obviously, we should have been much more prepared much earlier and the CDC should not have stopped, or the FDA should have stopped people from testing and all this stuff. And at the same time, you can start to see some of these ideas that come from the network kind of bubble up to the state, with examples of, you know, maybe an example here in San Francisco where I live again, these cool living houses, were already doing shelter in place, quarantining style things before the shelter in place started. And then as a result of that, other things, then the shelter play start, and then everybody started to do it. So, um, yeah, that's roughly what I want to say here. I would, I do want to say two quotes actually, which are interesting. Let me find them. Um, yeah. One is that there's a so when you think about how to organize like, Who's the leader of these groups, if they're interesting because there's just like, who is the Leader blacklivesmatter who is the leader of me too tough to say? I think that you can see someone. An example of this is someone like Balaji Srinivasan sorry, Balaji, who's helping lead these groups on who's been very vocal about this on Twitter. And the way that he does is he'll just make like a thread. That's just like, Hey, here's all of these awesome, decentralized bottom up projects that are happening, help them out, go join them. So it's more like a curator aspect and like a synthesizers synthesizer thing and like a request for proposal thing, that is like a Hey, we like here's money to do this specific thing. We're like, you must do blah, blah, blah. So I think that there's a you know, and as navall quoted after that, that after reading biology thread, he said, a Field Marshal Balaji rallying the decentralized tech malicious, Thank you, sir. So that's kind of the vibe here is like, rallying up some of these bottom of decentralized networks is interesting. Um, okay, I want to say Oh, and some other Don't say he's gonna quote, I think that Yeah, they're, they're worthwhile. I mean, there's both sides of this. I mean, there's a lot of, you know, some folks have said things, you know, you know,
I don't think this is necessary. This is what's happening. This is
one big part of network ism is the network or versus the state
that these organizations, they need to have money kind of where you can book these organizations. So moving on to point two now, sorry, to be clear, we are now moving on to point two
grants are another part of these bottom up networks. And I think that
you can imagine this as the US government giving Oh, that we're going to put a $2 trillion stimulus, you know, package, here's the money, versus some of these bottom things are people like, oh, here's money that's bubbling up, and whoever's doing good things should should take it. That ecosystem that grant ecosystem is happening and is cool, and it's Yeah. What would I primarily say on that? I think there is. I think those grants are, I would highlight a couple things. One is they can move more quickly. So there's this great thing under number two. So under number two, we have the grants. And, and the grants, there's some stuff like fast COVID is a really cool one, which just came out today, which is this way to fund research more quickly. So it's like, Hey, we know that things like the NSF exists for longer term research, but we need to, we're putting $10 million towards funding, whoever needs money if you need it now apply, and it's a 48 hour turnaround time. And so we're seeing that grant ecosystem and there's a bunch of different grant ecosystems that exist now. I talk about some of the more and this generosity piece because they're really, really tightly connected, the dollars and the generosity. So I'm not sure if I'm gonna say too much, but I guess the final thing I'd say is remember that There's a battle happening today between how much we should do, how much the state the nation state should provide this stuff or just how much these bottom up ecosystem should provide stuff. So, you know, a classic thing is like the billionaire philanthropy, you know versus nation state stuff. It's like, you know who should who should help? And, you know, should we tax the billionaires more Why do the billionaires have even that much money to give his Bill Gates funding? You know, he's funding the seven different factories to make these vaccines Oh, should he have been taxed of that money and then we should you know, let the nation state do that. These things are up for debate. I think in some folks would say that, and obviously, you know, some of the conservative agenda is to to, you know, if you look at, here's a nice quote of, you know, Trump cut. He declined to renew $600 million of funding for the CDC. He You know, he destroyed And the national security director for global health, security and bio defense. It just he obviously took down some of the nation states ability to deal with this stuff. And I think that, you know, on one side is, you know, this is Rob rish from Stanford, who says, In this recent opinion piece, the richest country in the world must step up to fund public health, rather than relying on the richest people in the world to do it piecemeal. That's kind of one side of the thing. And we're also seeing, of course, this like deterioration of these institutions, which is, you know, Mark letter from the charter cities Institute. He says, I've long thought that American institutions were in various states of decline and need to be revitalized, I was wrong. American institutions are run to their core 10s of thousands of people will die if we are lucky. And and maybe one other quote here from Sam Oberg. He says, from long now, he says, it is no victory for free society, the small segment of the online commentary are right, when all major institutions are wrong, we'll talk about that a little more as influencers piece. But again, it's like this weird thing where these bottom of networks seem to be doing a good job. And it's like, do you actually want the nation state to be doing that? I'm not sure. Me personally, my hot take on this is that, uh, I think that in general I'm very bullish on bottom of networks long term. I think that using I think, in this I could go into this for a variety of reasons, but they don't have the institutional history of some of these older slower and honestly, to some extent more patriarchal, you know, greedy capitalist ish, you know, these old institutions, they haven't history and, and they're slow, you know, in a time like this like they're they're slow and so using these new bottom up networks, feels feels powerful and and i'm interested by a future in which we're providing more public goods If you think about now, the amount of money given the amount of money given to
philanthropic organizations a close to amount that they spend is about 4 billion per year, sorry, 400 billion per year, while the amount that the US government spends is about 4 trillion per year, so it's 100 x more. And so I think that there's, I see no, it's 10 x more. And so yeah, there's what should that balance be? I'm not sure. But I do think there's a I'm generally bullish on networks long term. So yeah, that's a little bit on the grants side. I think that on the influencers versus mainstream media side, this has gotten a lot of markers out. This has gotten a lot more press is the influencer side. Versus mainstream media, what they mean what they've been going through is, you know, roughly speaking There's been, you know, if you look at who is quickest on understanding what's happening here, it feels like mainstream media. Throughout most of February, they weren't really telling us much. While a bunch of people on Twitter were like, hey, this could be a bad issue. This could be a bad issue. Maybe an example of this is this guy, Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz a16z who he doesn't really tweet anymore, but all of his tweets throughout the whole March or February sorry, throughout all of January and February, were just public service announcement. And then they were like, here's warning issues about the Coronavirus. And so we have this influencers versus mainstream media piece and there's a bonus piece here where it's like, you know, the the network influencers kind of were first on the scene, and then it seemed like and again, this might be my own liberal bias, but it seemed like the left wing media was much closer on the scene, and then the and then the right wing media was still even in The right wing media, various folks on various people on Fox, whatever we're just like, still saying it's the flu kind of stuff and really need to change their tune very quickly given the exponential curve. So it's influencers versus the mainstream media with a little bit of left right media in there. And, um, yeah, I guess this has been, what would I say about this, the the way that the way that I like to understand this is that there's a if you imagine, now that we have, you know, this is possible, remember that this is only possible, you know, 50 years ago, it was just mean, you could only get it from mainstream media, you know, there's no other option here. But now, you can actually get your information in other ways. And so, the way that Ben Thompson from circuitry, you know, draws it is that you have this graph of this is like information and this is when people are discussing a topic This is a lot of people discussing or at the beginning, not that many people, but we're discussing Coronavirus, and of that. This is quality of information quality and this is quantity of information. And so at the beginning, you have both a lot of high quality information over here, but also a lot of bad low quality information over there. But as long as you can, you know, be aware of what this looks like, wow, you can actually tap in there. And see, there's a lot of delicious, high quality information out there. And it's possible to be out there because the you know, anybody we have, we have the depending on what state you want to call we have the ability for people to check mainstream media now because of these decentralizes and journalism's so that's roughly what's happening there. Um, there's a lot of there's a lot of battling here. I mean, it's, it's interesting to still see stuff pop up with stuff like, you know, the masks for all thing. It's like, hey, it's Still bubbling up. It's like, okay, the experts are telling us x y, z, CDC and who is that actually correct? You know, while at the same time, stuff like flatten the curve or whatever that was, that was just a medium post, you know, that's been viewed 40 million times. It's just a big incredible thing. And, and that those things really started in from from, from the twittersphere. So
yeah, that's roughly the way I think about this stuff. Updates also. Yeah, no, I think that's roughly ranting about this stuff. There is a time um, yeah, that's that's essentially what's happened here. And this one will continue to be weird. I mean, with hydrochloric wing, that's a good hydrochloric, whatever the anti malarial drug that people are thinking about it. There's this this battle of folks who are saying use it saying not use it, and we're just in this tough reality. Actually, I do want to make this quote from 538 reasons There's a really nice quote about what it's like to be a consumer of this. And actually, I'll leave this for the coherent pluralism piece for a second actually. Nevermind. Um, cool. So there is we have these new networks that are starting. So and then the final one is the platform response, how platforms are responding. There's a really good piece from the Center for humane technology about this. And
I think
at a high level, a lot of this is the platform response really determines everything from a network ism perspective. We have this new network, these new platforms using massive social media platforms, they control a lot of our sense making capabilities. And so the way that they kind of nudge us in, you know, one direction or another really matters and so, you know, some of them have many of them have now put in, in the place of where ads would be or where things would be they put in like COVID like, hey, Up, this is COVID. So what's happening? here's, here's what's going on. And so we've seen both the platform's responded in a beautiful way like that, like, Hey, here's some issues, folks. And they still have a long way to go. I mean, they're essentially still just doing the simplest bare bones things which are like, allowing the CDC to, you know, put an ad in the side of the Twitter feed that says stay home safe, hashtag stay home, save lives. And it doesn't, it feels like the platform's could do a lot more by leveraging a lot of their existing behavioral technology, behavioral psychology techniques on us to do things to make us really, really give more of a feeling for why this is important and to really shape our minds a little bit more, which is a little bit scary, but I think is mostly correct. It's like kind of libertarian paternalism. Yeah, okay. Sweet. So that's roughly network ism. A lot of high level, what's happening is we have these new networks, we're moving from an ecosystem of just like with, you know, the Industrial Revolution and how the Industrial Revolution pre Industrial Revolution, and pre the printing press. It was the church, the church was super, super powerful and things like, you know, empires and agencies were kind of powerful, but never really exist as much of this. And now, we're moving to the after that though, you move to the place where it's like, Wow, now we have these new massive nation states and companies start to exist, companies became a thing. And we're, again, we're switching to a thing where these new networks, which are based off this new digital technology of zero marginal cost, information, distribution and propagation around the entire world, those are very, very, very powerful. And they have their own competitive axis on this motivation coordination thing here, where they're, you know, where the good hashtag SPP is better at doing certain things and the government is doing and that's okay. And this doesn't mean that the government is going to go away doesn't mean that companies aren't going to go Go away, just like the church has stayed around, just like religious Round, we're still gonna have the things from past ages in our current age. But yeah, these new orders are coming in hot. And so you can see some of these networked orcs that are doing awesome cool work here. You can see the state doing some cool things kind of ledger blazing and implementing some of these things but also being kind of slowly weekend Friday ways. You can see from a dollars perspective some of these bottom up grant ecosystems. With you know, the billionaire philanthropy questions there. You can also see some of this info, information ecosystems as they ecosystem being this battle versus the online influencers versus mainstream media. And then you can also see the platform's response to this as the main mediators in our sense making environment. So that is, roughly speaking, network ism. Let's go to coherent parallelism because it's super connected to network ism. And compare pluralism is roughly the idea that maybe draw this and it might help. So it's roughly the idea that you're you should Put on, won't let him actually I'll draw in a second. It was the case, you know, back at the early 1900s, when their new radio and then later you know, with TV in the 50s, or whatever, you got your one story, okay? And that was like the modernist story. And then people start to reject those stories into into have this world post modernism like God, no truth or whatever. And then you have this progression to meta modernism, where you say, ah, we should both not, we shouldn't reject all the stories, but we should accept some of them and combine them together to make a nice good story while also incorporating new stories. That's roughly what coherent pluralism is. It's this move from this mainstream media as seen kind of stage one. This kind of like there's one story then this move to you call. You call the next thing fake. You call fake news you call post modernism. And that is the idea that Oh, that's rejected. Let's read there is no truth. You know, we're just, we're this new network reality, I get my information from here, you get it from there whatever truth the everybody gets to see the world their own way. That's not wrong, or that's not right. It's also not wrong. In this, this synthesis version of this is this view where you're taking in a lot of pluralistic viewpoints. And you're trying to still create coherence among them and have a clear vision and future for what happens forward. So that's this move to coherent realism or CP.
The reason why, and I kind of think about it as you're putting on a bunch of different lenses, and then creating coherence among them, you can think of it as consuming a red feed, blue feed and then creating coherence, whatever that looks like for you. And so we've obviously this is very connected to network ism, because very connected to our sense making environment. And what it really is, is that it is this idea that when you have an information environment like this, this this graph from statuary, where you have a bunch of information A lot of it's fine, but a lot of can be low quality and a lot of candidates actually pretty high quality. It's up to individuals. It's It is our responsibility now in the world in the networked world, to take more responsibility for information consumption, if you are not actively curating your Twitter feed and searching for more insightful, great people to follow. If you are not, if you're just consuming from one source and not consuming for multiple sources, that's on you. You're not you're not doing the right thing. Essentially, you're not being a responsible information consumer. And of course, it's a balance between responsible information consumption and like the platform's like the platform's, obviously, it would be best for them to encourage our responsible consumption and not just to feed us conspiracy theories all the time, but you also there's an individual responsibility here. So that's what coherent pluralism is, and I think we've seen shut up with Coronavirus in two ways. There's one way it's just like the like what is a how to determine truth.
And then the other way is with empathy and like empathizing with others.
So there's truth and there's empathy. And I think that on the truth side, that's what we've seen with the stuff like the get, you know, the hashtag masks for all and stuff where it's like, oh, how, why should you wear a mask or not? You know, it's like you're trying to consume all these different things as a right or wrong. I just want to read this great quote from this 538 article, this recent 538 article, which I'm pulling up right now, that which was about Should we do masks right now? And if the answer was yes, probably maybe not. And, and this I just want to read this quote from the bottom it says, ultimately, the expert advice on masks and then in parentheses and hand washing and death tolls and social distancing, etc, etc. is to get comfortable with not knowing the right answer. You can and should have some trusted advisors, you can and should read up on why certain Are aren't being recommended. There are a lot of issues around this fire somewhere two experts can read the same data and come to different conclusions. For the rest of us, that means accepting that sometimes we'll just have to do the best we can without a clear set of instructions. That's one of the best gifts we can give ourselves. So this is the coherently plural perspective. It's just like, you got to be comfortable with not knowing the right answer, but you got to search you got to try the best, you know. Um, so that's, that's one part of the coherent pluralism piece. And I think that when you're doing this truth thing, you really should be searching for as many yes and perspectives as possible. Yes, ANDing is a great example of coherent pluralism and meta modernism, where you're trying to see a certain mindset and you're trying to see the opposite minds and trying to hold the truths in both of them as much as possible. So for something like that for something like Coronavirus stuff We've seen
repeal.
Yeah, we've we've seen folks who are what am I doing?
Oh, the Yes. And perspectives. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so two examples, just the masks one is a super easy one where it's like, okay, yes, it seems like, you know, we obviously know that 95 masks are good and that surgical masks are good. or cross math cloth masks are good or not. And, and to be able to see that pretend to be like, okay, yes, we do want to have more and more people wearing masks. And we want to make sure that there are enough masks for the health workers. So to be able to see both those at the same time is powerful. Another Yes. And here is, you know, this like, you know, economics versus lives calculation where it's like, hey, yes, we want to save protect as many lives as possible with the hashtag flatten the curve, hashtag stay home, save lives, etc. and We do know that economic growth has a long term impact, it has a long term, you know, from a progress to these perspective or from all these projects, it does have an impact on on qualities, and it does have an impact on on health and well being. And so, how to balance those two is obviously very difficult. And I don't mean to say like, let's kill the old people, but be able to see both of these perspectives is I think, helpful. So, um, yeah, that's roughly speaking, what coherent pluralism is from a truth perspective. And then from an empathy perspective, I think that there's a, what this mainly looks like is again, in our networked reality, we can look at, we can go to anywhere in the world and see those people and see how they're living, you know, which is really cool. And the most beautiful example of this with Coronavirus was when Italy when some random media thing from Italy made a video with, you know, 30 ish random people from 30 like random people, just talking to their, you know, their, their Mac books or whatever, saying, hey, then at that point time, Italy was 10 days ahead of us, and we're experiencing it pretty poorly. And they were warning Americans. Look, you got it. I know, it might not seem bad yet, but please listen to us like it's gonna get bad. And it was just, you know, 25 different vignettes of that. And so that was a good example of just this empathy piece, this ability for us to really empathize with other people around the world and then use that to kind of inform our decisions to be more coherently plural. So that is going on pluralism. It's mostly a response to network ism, and it was individual responsibility for folks to do. Let me say one final piece on both of these before moving on to the side, which is there is a catch because I forgot about this but I think it is important this influencers versus mainstream media piece, we saw this with the financial crisis was like there were some people who were early on that were like, Yo, this is an issue this could be bad mortgage backed securities and and similarly, we saw People who were clicking on this Coronavirus thing. And and also, I'm reminded of like kind of 538 versus other mainstream media for the political the 2016 election, where a lot of folks on the left were like, Okay, we got this thing in the bag mostly, and didn't really, really didn't really take into account of the data or the didn't really fully realize the 30% chance is still a high percentage chance of Trump getting elected. And so, you know, New York Times after that they issued they wrote a thing and said, how did how did the media and then parentheses How did we get this thing wrong? So expect to see some of that from some of these mainstream media outlets, I think is, you know, we already see the left hating on the right for their for how they've done a poor job in conveying these health and safety risks to their viewers. And I think we'll see eventually, some of other media outlets, you know, on the left being like, Hey, we just kind of get this wrong, and how can we be more careful into some of these bottom up influencer sense making networks. Cool. me thank you so Kenny on our found things I want to say on this now you got a bunch of years lots of interesting
interesting stuff.
But that seems pretty good. Um, okay, so
let's talk about generosity and bento ism. Let's start with bento ism because it's kind of an example of coherent pluralism. So bento ism is this nice framework, it could be called bento ism. It could also be called a zoom out box or a future us box. And the idea behind it comes from this guy, Nancy Strickler who full disclosure is a friend and collaborator of mine. And he is he made this box about our current what we need to do in society in order to shift to like, you know, push capitalism. And what it looks like is it's this nice little box, a little two by two
and it has now
It has now me in one corner and so that's when you're thinking about your now me needs and you're like, what do I need? I need safety I need food I need health you know. And also those now my needs have been kind of hyper financialized and we're kind of too greedy to get all these gimme gimme now me all these needs like obesity and addictive technology all stuff is just like fueling our now me in greed. And so then you can kind of zoom out a bit though that's what the box helps you do, just to say oh, what about future me? What does future me think? And so future me is kind of your old self, you know your eight year old cell phone and be like, hey, Reese, you know, you're you're the wiser self saying hey, you know, this is what, here's how to live a life of your values or whatever. And so this is these needs are things like meaning. So it's like, well, how can I make sure I'm living a life of meaning and how can I make sure my my future self is kind of talking to my present self. And then there's now us so this is you when you zoom out? From now me to now us, life is not just about me, it's about us, it's about everybody. And so these are kind of your now us needs, again, this need based perspective, these now us needs of connection of human connection. Those are also super, super important. It's also helpful to recognize what's your now meet needs are met, you kind of help others out and kind of move to that now us space as well. And then finally, there's future us. Future us and future us is thinking about your own kids and, you know, future you kids of your friends and family, the kids of everybody on Earth, it's just thinking about the earth and going future, you know, into future generations. So that is a future us. So this is this nice little two by two, it's actually very helpful. In order to understand a variety of things in society, you can actually map a bunch of like movements and things like effective altruism into this little map. So, we can see benta wisdom within Coronavirus because it is You know it primarily we've seen a big part of this mentalist philosophy and mindset is that we are not stuck in our right now. We are kind of stuck in this kind of late stage capitalism mindset. And it would actually probably be a lot better if we were able to take a lot of let's say, you know, all the money we spend on you know, I'm gonna hate on someone here. That's all the money we spend on watches and jewelry or whatever it's like,
it might be too much if we
decrease a lot of that social signaling a lot of that kind of now me focused greed or however many houses you have heard our, if we move that away, and we say, Oh, wait a second, I can recognize that I don't necessarily need that stuff and I can move it towards just for me personally connection, how can I have better connection with the friends and family around me? How can I you know, have self actualization and stuff and help future us And so that kind of shift is what bento ism is all about that move away from now me and financial maximization and That shift we can see that stuff starting to happen with this crisis and it happens with all crises it you know, this is the idea of the swords to plowshares idea, or the plow sired plowshares swords where it's like during a time of war, and this is, you know, the whenever the act is that can turn factories into, hey, you're making perfumes No, no, you're making sanitizer and sanitizer. And so we can see those shifts starting to happen as really what this box is all about is like,
what are humanity's needs?
You know, what do we need? Okay, cool, let's allocate resources, let's put money towards them, put markets towards him, you know, let's put let's make some laws and maybe help us there. Let's, you know, put some stuff up. Let's make some norms, whatever that looks like to deal with our needs. And what this is doing is showing us that we have that ability, we have that ability to shift that a bunch of people can say, Oh, we need to spend a lot more time and effort thinking about are you building masks cool. Let's do that. You know, let's, let's shift needs and so more than anything, this is just it just, it just allows us to know that we live in a paradigm to know that we live in a mindset to know that we have a hidden default and say, that doesn't need to be thing. And so this is the crisis helps us in a way, you know, there's just it's kind of like a wake up, wake up moment.
and assign them we can do that shifting. And so yeah, the
other thing I'd say here is we can also see a little bit of shifts, like with all these things, you can see positive shifts, like Oh, look at this, everybody's, you know, being more generous forever. And you can see negative shapes like that people are really focusing on themselves and becoming, you know, like Trump's trying to stop trying to patent or whatever the vaccine just for us so um, yeah, so you can see that too with bento ism where you have of course, there's been a lot of focus on now mean making sure that everybody in your families all right, you know, that's that's a real it's a real check moment. here and then also the future me I mean time gets very weird here and so just connecting in with future me is really helpful in these times and and thinking about meaning here as we you know what is meaning in the time Coronavirus is kind of a weird weird question. And the now as in future us buckets, I think that there's a now us bucket that really this has made us a lot more aware of our now us. It's missing. Okay. Here are a what is our what is our default of interacting with people? That's cool. And how much do we need those people around us? And
how do we?
Yeah, and in recognizing things where you say, hey, and these are kind of social justice perspectives, or it's like, hey, if you go out there in the world, and, and just keep on hanging out with folks as a young person, and then eventually like, ends up taking the life of an old person like that ain't right. So that's the kind of the now us Nice now as prospective that we've been brought into is that you too can flatten the curve. And really recognizing our interconnectedness. I think that's a big part of that. Now us, and in the future is perspective. I think more than anything, this is kind of showing us that we are, you know, the viruses, the other, and in the future us is this networked human organism. It's what we are all part of. And so, I think, yeah, I think that the future offs has, has changed, hopefully to recognize our interconnectedness. And, and the fact that we are all kind of in this together, of course, there's the negative side there, people are becoming more and more isolated from each other. But I think long term I'm optimistic about the, the macro network, human organism piece. So let me think here, and maybe there's one other piece here, which is future us it's also shown us, the kind of, we think about in the future, both for future me and future us, what are the law of adjacent possible next steps and really, this fire Changes those in a big way. And we'll go into that in future episodes. But yeah, it's what's possible now is very different than what was possible, you know, six months ago. And then the final piece I want to say is that, yeah, there's a another future us perspective, which is, you know, really taking more of a long term view where you can see a lot of the people who have been, our supply chains are just in time supply chains, that are hyper optimized for efficiency and not resiliency. And so it's likely to be the case in the future where we have supply chains that are better at Yeah, being being resilient instead of just efficient. So having that kind of future facing resilient perspective. Yeah, so that's bento ism here and I think that the more than anything to conclude more than anything this is showed us that just like people did in World War One, World War Two and other times in life, you can really, you can go into wartime mode, you know, you can really shift your needs of society to be in alignment and so Hopefully this will be a kind of a test for us or like a little exercise for us to be like, yeah, this is how we can shift our needs. And so after this, again, we'd hoped that we would shift our needs more towards future us and towards climate change and stuff. So that's what that looks like. Okay, generosity is the final piece here. Obviously, overall, there's some coherent flow in general. See, there's a lot of juicy stuff here, just like there's a lot of juicy stuff in network. So less, there's less of a there's generally just less stuff and go here and pluralism, bento ism, or at least I don't quite understand it. All right, I don't have as much as many ideas there. So let's talk about generosity for a second. So generosity is the idea that, um, is roughly the idea that you can, it's this move towards abundance in society. And the great example that there's this great world and data graph that shows the six graphs of the last 200 years how Has society done on a bunch of key metrics, and one of them is something like extreme poverty. And 90, you know, 200 years ago, 90% of people were in extreme poverty. And now it's less than 10%. That's awesome. So we both have this macro perspective of, you know, these six graphs, and that they're all saying, oh, things are getting a lot better. And then we also have the micro perspective, where you have individuals, these are studies for individuals who say, hey, after you know, money has diminishing returns on happiness and the CEO after about, you know, $45,000 per year, it's really, really levels out the amount, the amount, the amount, that money makes you happier. So at the beginning, your first thousand bucks matters a lot. But then after about $45,000 here, you're not really it's just essentially a flatline at that point. And so, once you reach that point, and you have abundance than you then you can kind of be generous without needing to reach If that makes sense, where it's like, oh, I just have bonus money here Do you want it in? And I can talk about a lot of examples where that happens in my life. You know, I don't even have like 10,000 bucks. But it's just a beautiful feeling. Like I got it. Do you want this money? I don't need I don't need it, you want it? So that's the generosity piece. That's what this generosity buttons piece means is like, okay, we have enough. And you can see this in a wide variety of ways with Coronavirus stuff. The easiest example probably is again, another hashtag, it's the hashtag pass the check,
which is from gift directly. And the idea here is that the US government is, you know, put giving every American 1200 dollars. And, you know, if you need that money, cool, but if you don't need it, just pass it on. And about 1000 people have taken this pledge thus far. So it's only going to be you know, that's about a million bucks, which is not a ton, but it's also not nothing. And these are people That are just realizing it themselves. They're like, Oh, do I need this is money from the government right now? Not really good, I can pass on to someone else who might really need it. So, I think that's a cool example. And a beautiful example. And again, these are all pro examples. It's not the case. We're just just now reaching this phase where more and more people are at this, oh, I can be generous, please and actually recognizing it, that they have abundance. And so you know, the last year as a financial crisis, I didn't see anything with a hashtag past the check hashtags and even exist at that time really, and people weren't weren't doing stuff like this. So really, maybe it's a case of during the next big crisis if there's again, a bunch more money injected from the top down. Maybe at that point time, 10,000 people or a million people pass on the check.
So
Okey, dokey. Back to the bathroom.
I know you needed to know that. And I let you know that. So
yeah, we got generosity passed. Check. Pretty sweet. Another example this is all these amazing mutual aid groups that are coming up. And these are both being bought them are being generous in the non monetary sense of just like, hey, here, I'm offering this dozen videos you want, do you want this thing I can offer, you know, to bring you groceries or whatever. And I also am requiring someone's combined gardener, whatever. So that's like a mutual aid thing. A lot of these mutual aid things are just beautiful, where they're saying, hey, um, you know, they're just these big assumption, right? mutual aid. They're these really nice, just a spreadsheet, where people are just offering up, they're just offering up money. They're saying, Hey, I can give up to you know, 500 bucks and Venmo over this week, and $50 increments just messaged me and if you want and I'll give it to you. That's cool. You know, that's really cool. I think that's a again, all of these combined the generosity piece or the abundance piece. Plus the network isn't peace, where it's just people being like, Hey, we're on money. Let me know and I'll give it to you. And this I think is especially interesting because a lot of the I've done some experiments this before where I will put up, like I put on Craigslist, like, Hey, here's a free hundred $20. And you know, one person took it. And but it was a weird people thought it was weird people thought was really weird. Or is another example I put up some money into an aetherium wallet, and then posted the private key for that wallet online and said, Hey, everybody wants to take this you can. And for both those people like well, this is kind of weird. But that's very similar to some of these mutual aid, things that are happening, which are people just being like, you're essentially taking the way that I envisioned it. And a lot of this generosity stuff in the capital base stuff is all about pools, pools of money. And so you put up this pool of money, and you say, Hey, does anybody else want, you know, some money from this pool, and you just kind of lift it up and you say, 500 bucks this week, anybody wants it, and then other people do it. There's enough trust and we'll talk about trust. Maybe a different type of trust is a big part of all this stuff. Trust and then people will just pull it down. You don't there's enough trust us that people are like, well, I just, I bet that you're going to use it for the good thing. I don't think you're gonna, I don't know, do a bad thing with it, whatever that would be. And so yeah, so it's just putting a pools of money in and allowing others to kind of pull it down. So those are beautiful, new shared, mutual link things. And of course, similar to the grant side here, a lot of these, you know, network generosity is very similar to this grants ecosystem. There's a lot of this billionaire philanthropy stuff. And this again, in this verse is sketchy in a wide variety ways. But recent example this you can kind of see which side I'm on here is more on the like, oh, at least. But a recent example, this is jack Dorsey from Twitter slash square, putting up 20% of his net worth, which is a lot of money is deeper, but essentially a billion bucks. It's not like he gave it directly today, but he put it into a vehicle and that vehicle is going to spend it on COVID stuff now, and then girls education and health later So, but it is it is, it is cool that a lot of these I think it's what I say. I think that this abundance mindset, I'm much more happy that people like Bill Gates and jack Dorsey are giving their money and recognizing their abundance and being quote unquote generous than I am with the folks who are just hoarding that money. And I'm especially excited by the people who are just just above the abundance line. Folks like myself or whoever who are just like, Okay, I have enough that I can pass on my cheque or that I can, you know, give money to this mutual aid thing and just offer people money on Venmo You know, there's other beautiful examples of this. There's like 200 a bunch of companies are doing this creating like, you know, Miller Lite or whatever put me like a million dollar funds to to tip restaurant workers or whatever. But then there's also individuals who are doing this. There's like this fund in San Francisco $200,000 went into it
for a bunch of different people
who were just like, Hey, we just want to support the artists we are going to go to a bunch of these concerts now we can't we still have to support them, you know, during this time. So the bottom up initiatives are really really cool. There's a couple other ones like the two biggest things on GoFundMe right now or some of these bottom up initiatives. It's like a one for 15,000,001 for about 10 million. And again, they're spearheaded by you know, this one in for mostly masks stuff for PvE things is it has a million bucks from Arnold Schwarzenegger a million bucks from Paul Graham but also has you know $8 million from a bunch of other people so
yeah, I think that my my, my takeaway
here is that we're seeing people experience their own micro abundance of capital here It allows you to do this now me overflow piece where you can take where you're now me is filled up and you can put that money into future me or future us or now us and then it just makes you happier. You didn't it wasn't gonna make you happier. You can give it these other things and actually increase your happiness again. Meaning it gives you more connection, it gives you more self actualization. And that's awesome. And that's beautiful. And people are doing it at the micro level with, you know, hashtags, mutual aid communities and stuff like that individuals are doing it and networks are doing. And of course, we have the billionaire philanthropy side as well, or they're doing it.
Okay, so, in conclusion, yeah, that's
these four kind of perspectives are roughly how I see the world and see things transitioning here. And they're also there for how I see the crisis. And so, again, from a network ism perspective, we can see stuff, we can see these bottom up decentralized networks, kind of providing new ways to coordinate and motivate around things and are kind of out competing existing institutions. And to solve these needs. We can see folks respond from a coherently plural perspective where there's this new decentralized sense making environment and fake news obviously isn't the answer. So you need to have some coherence. Also some pluralism so you can see people responding to their information environment with some coherent pluralism. You can also see some bento ism, which in and of itself is an example of coherent pluralism. It's a thorough list taking notes, for different perspectives, it's very coherent, it's just a nice little simple two by two. And more than anything, we can see this as a time for waking up for like, okay, we can go into wartime mode, we can change our needs, we can, hopefully in the future, you know, addressed climate change and stuff like that. And finally, we can see the generosity piece as well, where folks are recognizing their own abundance and are being generous with it and are allowing money to flow through them and offering up to share pools to give back to the to others. So that's, that's what's happening. And hopefully, we continue to do things like this because this set of four things is a kind of a crucial is these four parameters are crucial for our future. So
the other thing I'd add, though, is that
this stuff is not. There's a negative here too,
so I'm an enthusiast. gastic earnest kind of guy, but I think there's obviously some negative pieces here, I mean, from a network ism perspective, we can both see how we can see a lot of negatives here, a, we can see how it's a negative, that the state is just not doing what it should be doing. It's like, it'd be nice if we had a state that was maybe closer to some of the nation states that we've had in the past that has had a very clear, awesome, responsive, you know, reaction to this. And instead, we have kind of a slower moving kind of beast. And we can imagine, also, some of the negatives here that this these networks are own, you know, it's it, there's a lot of uncertainty and newness with them. And so you have you connected to coherent pluralism. You have a lot of people where with these decentralized networks sense making stuff like what the hell is happening here, it's can be very difficult. And you could have folks who instead of having a nice, one clear picture that is mostly true, which may be what we
had in the past.
Instead, you have a lot of folks who are just only on the side of negative misinformation who are consuming bad things and then those things may eventually kill them. Especially in this the coding time. So those are some of obviously the negatives of a decentralized sense making system. And then we can also see some of the negatives
of of
people responding to,
to the crisis in a bad way where they're, they aren't waking up, but they're either waking up and just focusing on now me and focusing on isolationism or something like that. Or they're focusing on they're allowing the wake up moment, but they're right now at a time for everybody is so excited, like, who this is a blank slate time. Let's use it for our own good. So this is, you know what someone like Naomi Klein would call crisis capitalism. Or it's like, ooh, let's just take this crisis and use it as a way to push through a bunch of things that are actually gonna be bad for people and will keep us in a plutocratic awful society.
So and then the
final piece on the generosity side, we can both see the positives.
But we got to see the negatives. I mean, Jeff Bezos did a good job and giving 100 million dollars of his wealth, but that's much less than 20% which is what no jack Dorsey gave, and so we can still see You know, the other the flip side of generosity is that it when people do studies about this, there's actually this great quote that I actually want to read from this person, Kathy O'Neill, who wrote weapons of mass destruction, and she was talking about predictions for the future. And one of her predictions was a beautiful thing,
which I'm about to read right now. And that thing says,
once a health emergency is over, we will see the extent to which rich well connected and well resourced communities will have been taken care of, while contingent, poor and stigmatized communities will have been thoroughly destroyed that's gonna happen and that is awful. And so we're we have some generosity here and some giving back and we sell things pretty bad power structures, and people with lots and lots of inequality.
So um, yeah, so I hope this was helpful to understand how I see the world and
how these four boxes are ways to see Coronavirus and post capitalism in future episodes a please let me know if you have Feedback I noticed is, is test number one, if you either have feedback on my situation, my environment was easy to see, was it hard to hear when I was facing this way? You know,
stuff like that?
Is it by you? How was my rambling?
Were the images helpful? Etc, etc. So please watch this at two x speed.
And then the other thing I say is, yeah, I'm hoping to do future episodes that are on things. Like, you know, this is kind of our current response. But if we see about the transition, like what, what is going to happen next, that's kind of a whole other set of of concerns. And so I think doing one
on that is what I'll do next. So with that, I hope you're doing well. Please let me know if your feedback please let me know if this is helpful if you have any ideas and thank you and goodbye