A Different World

Recently I took a 6 hour flight out of NYC and woke up to a different world. One much less intimidating and sinister; where the people are kind and friendly, where exchanges involve more humans than corporations, where capital seems to play a lot less importance in day-to-day interactions.

It has been my cup of tea, like the art I saw yesterday.

Finally, I have the space to think: what are some of my dominant assumptions and ideologies about how the world should work?

I started thinking about this because of a job interview at a tech firm many months ago. During the interview, it was evident that the team operated on tacit assumptions and ideologies in the way the world should work, the way humans should interact, and the things humans should see to make decisions.

There was a deep divergence between my assumptions and said tech firms'. To me, the assumptions that tech engineers have about the way things should work are more powerful than the creation of the platform itself.

So that got me thinking about what I think it means to be human right now, and why my worldview differs so greatly from the people I interviewed with. It really boils down to this: I think that life is not nasty, brutish, and short.

Many years ago, my first political philosophy lecture at university was on Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. It was published in the mid-1600s, and perhaps more reflective of society then.

Hobbes, unlike me, was of the view that in the absence of an established political or social structure, life would be "nasty, brutish, and short", where society will be engulfed in chaos, and where individuals will be in constant competition for resources and security. It stems from his belief that humans are driven by self-interest, and would engage in a struggle for power and use excessive force to dominate the other in the pursuit of self-preservation.

These ideas were later prevalent in Darwinism. I recently saw a book by Darwin at the University of Antioquia (pictured here) and was reminded of his theories.

Darwin was of the view that living organisms are perpetually embroiled in a struggle for existence, and wrote of an inevitable struggle for life and that evolution was driven by “the way of nature, from famine and death”. To evolve, you must first compete. Newtonian-Cartesian theories also reflect assumptions about the immutable state of atoms in a fragmented world, which gave rise to beliefs about genetic reductionism and determinism. Then we have the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" by ecologist Garret Hardin, which reflected a similar view where individual users, motivated by their own self-interest, will inevitably deplete a shared resource.

In 1990, Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics offered an alternative perspective. With careful science and in-depth case studies, she instead demonstrated how individuals and communities have been capable of managing shared resources, without the need for centralised regulation or privatisation for resource management, contrary to the tragedy of commons thesis. The movie Oppenheimer taught me more about quantum theory and how the world is not made of hard, immutable matter, challenging Newtonian-Cartesian theories by demonstrating the capability of dynamic transformation of particles into waves and waves into particles, and that I have to unlearn and challenge the mechanistic paradigm of knowledge.

And so I have reason to think that life is not nasty, brutish, and short. Instead, life evolves through cooperation and self-organisation, instead of competition. In fact, I recently learnt that the Santa Cruz river in Tucson, Arizona would not have dried up if the community had shared the resource instead of competitively over-pumping because of perceived scarcity (the annual rainfall is more than sufficient for the population). Matter is not immutable. Within a human body, trillions of cells are in cooperation, and in ecosystems and the planet, millions of species cooperate. And for me, perhaps this is why I've always thought of others as collaborators than competitors, even when embedded in an environment where I was made to think otherwise.

(..like the bell curve in the Singapore education system..)

But unfortunately, the belief in innate selfishness and scarcity remains as one of the core ideologies that undergird the development of many new technologies today, and was a sentiment that was evident in the folks I interviewed with. It was not my cup of tea. And despite Ostrom's work, the belief in innate human selfishness remains prevalent in other fields like economics, policy, and information sciences. In many ways, these beliefs have also permitted limitless exploitation and resulted in less than optimal outcomes.

So where do we go from here?

Shortly after the interview, Matt and I were in the Bay Area visiting the Prelinger Library, and Megan Prelinger gifted me 'Blockchain Chicken Farm' and in Gen Z lingo, I felt seen. In the book, Xiaowei Wang writes:

Instead of designing technology that fosters and cultivates communal behaviors of trust, we still design technology that assumes scarcity and cultivates selfishness. This coercive design relies on a view of human nature that comes from a Hobbesian era when people barely had running water, a fictional, universal view of humanity that has been disproved over and over by research.

We operate under game theory conditions, under market forces, under the belief that we will lie to each other because someone else has more, and we have more to gain. And so we create solutions that further exacerbate this inequality. This is what happens when resources like food are treated as commodities to be bought and sold, to make money from, instead of as a basic human right.

To me, the trajectory I hope to be on is to build networks that foster collaboration, instead of one where individuals are seen to have a dog-eat-dog, race to riches mentality. This extends beyond technology to mindset and institutional changes. Cultural change management is one of the hardest things to achieve. Individually, it is much easier. The practice of abundance starts by shifting my mind away from perceived scarcity to how I can work with others to create abundance.

Anyhow, just taking the time to think about this has already set off a process of investigating why I think the way I think. In my circle many may agree with me. I'd like to think many would also disagree, and I welcome that. We all have our own underlying assumptions on what it means to be human, and this motivates our beliefs and norms that we abide by, and I am in no position to dictate that there should be one monoculture and a homogenous way of thinking.

(Where I hope this does not end up is in a cultural cleavage, where individuals are more united in what they are against than actually proposing specific alternatives to work towards.)

Up until recently, I used to think of blockchain as a technology that challenges the notion of individuals as competitors and would be the ideal technology to support the development of a collaborative culture and foster community governance. But Xiaowei Wang has offered a separate perspective, by stating that blockchain leads with "the idea that bad actors are intrinsic in a system, and to prevent their actions, enormous amounts of electricity must be spent on preventing them through hashing functions":

Blockchain, like an authoritarian regime, uses a parallel logic: people cannot be trusted in a free market, and bad actors are intrinsic to a social system. In order to mediate trust, a technical infrastructure is better than a government; governments are made up of fallible people, whereas technical infrastructure works automatically. Instead of the government moderating trust, blockchain does so with machines.

Under authoritarianism, which benefits from holding expertise within its realm of power, and under an economic system that thrives off inequality in creating a market, of course blockchain is here to stay.

I am still mulling on the above and formulating my thoughts. Until then.