Devolutionary Technology

The capitalists will vie with each other for the smart contract.

In each stage of the vaportrad historical process, the new order creates the conditions that will lead to their eventual undoing. The martial elite creates a complex social order that it’s not fit to manage. The managerial elite creates conditions for a complex economic market that it’s not fit to manage. The mercantile elite creates consumer goods that empower the working class at their own expense.

Vladimir Lenin wrote, “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.” This is exactly what’s occurring throughout the contemporary economy, with disruptive technological innovation removing more and more mercantile middlemen from the process. This began with Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that enabled consumers to quickly and easily subvert the music industry’s massive cartel.

Within a few years, the music industry was caught in an inexorable race to the bottom, forced to sell music at truly competitive prices while gutting and streamlining an infrastructure that its profit model no longer supported. This same napsterization process has infected the pornography industry as well, with the human trafficking cartel and its numerous directors, producers, distributors, storefronts, and websites replaced by technology that directly connects the industry’s producers and consumers with the middlemen reduced to mere payment processors. 

A vast web of parasitical mercantile middlemen used to profit from a taxi medallion racket, purchasing medallions from the city and then reselling them to taxi drivers at an inflated cost, with the expense being passed through to consumers. The advent of uber broke this cartel as well. Like with the alien spaceships collapsing in the final scenes of War of the Worlds, devolutionary technological innovation is doing more than merely disrupting the western mercantile order -- it’s destroying it altogether.

The final step in this process will be cryptocurrency technologies replacing conventional investment, lending, and central banking. Those who insist that the central banks are too powerful to be brought down by open source volunteer projects would do well to consider how napster brought down the music industry with little resistance. The music industry did attempt to fight back with lawsuits, court orders, and propaganda, but disruptive innovation is unstoppable.

The best historical parallel is perhaps the disruptive innovation of iron weaponry, which could be more cheaply and easily procured and produced than bronze weaponry. Because bronze weaponry, like nuclear weaponry, required a powerful and centralized state with strong monopolies on far-flung trade, the bronze age empires arose. Because the scale of the locus of power is a simple function of military technology, the innovation of iron weaponry resulted in a swift and seismic collapse of the bronze age empires.

We’re at the brink of a similar cascade failure of the unipolar American Empire and the cracks in the wall are forming all around if one knows where to look. Those who prevail will, like the “sea peoples” of yesteryear, be the first men to embrace the emergent technologies driving this process. Technological progress is now a decentralizing force rather than a centralizing one. Technology is an empowering force rather than a disempowering one. The fear of technology common in identitarian circles is a product of conservative priors and the quintessentially conservative impulse: fear of change.