Technocracy

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those of my specific generation — who came of age in the eighties — our radical departure with the gammon and boomers of the past was the rejection of centralisation. We took our parents suspicion of the Man and formalised it. The movement leaders were not of Generation X, but they spoke to our aspirational, optimistic, hopeful ethic. Ronald Reagan captured our vibe

Government is not the answer to the problem: it is the problem.

And the Walkman symbolised it: Individualistic, technophiliac, selfish.

The ideological war was won. History was at an end. Around the world the State got out of the people's hair. Call it what you will: Reaganomics, Rogernomics]], Thatcherism, Perestroika, laissez-faire, deregulation, monetarism. There were losers, as there will be in any rearrangement of the social contract, but it wasn’t us. We were the right side of history, which had finished anyway. Laissez faire: basic gist: bottom up beats top down. In a free society individuals are best placed and best incentivised to make their own decisions. Abrogate that principle only where those criteria do not apply.

Those criteria: formal: there is better information at the coalface, and bureaucratic machinery is slow, lossy and costly: an informed decision can be made most quickly, with the least unnecessary engagement of bureaucracy and state machinery, at the edges of the network.

Substantive: those are the edge of the network have the most skin in the game. It is their life, their school, their community. They have strong incentives to make good and efficient decisions, because they will be most directly disadvantaged if they don’t.

As it always does to the revolting masses, the conversation seemed to be over. The riddle of sociopolitics was solved.

As it always does, History had other ideas. Now we are the boomers, the kids seem to be signing a different song. (Enjoy it, kids: the next generation is on your tail.) The laissez-faire ideal has been lost.

The shift away from 1980s laissez-faire economics wasn't primarily driven by a rejection of its central idea (that individuals make better decisions for themselves than central authorities). Instead, it was enabled by technological changes - specifically the rise of networks, data collection, and algorithms - that made centralized decision-making appear more feasible and efficient than before.

This technological shift created a foundation for increased central control in two ways: 1. It addressed the practical "capability" problem of central planning (through better monitoring and optimization) 2. After the Cold War, there was a belief that major moral questions had been resolved, reducing concerns about centralized moral decision-making

The current backlash against this system is different from the 1980s free-market movement. Rather than being led by academics with theoretical arguments about economic efficiency, it's more populist and focused on concrete personal freedoms, especially free speech. This backlash is gaining momentum as people recognize how much individual autonomy has been eroded by technocratic control.

The movement has allied figures like Trump and Musk, but their actual commitment to consistent freedom-maximizing principles remains uncertain.

Crypto technocracy

The crypto-libertarian take: crypto promises to fix the technocratic problem of regulation by substituting it with code. Code is law.

But the problem of regulation is not technological but human. Indeed mistaking it for a technological problem is what got us here in the first place. Libertarians, of all people, should understand regulations not as abstract technical artefacts that create bad incentives — though, sure, they do this — but as a by-product of hard-wired human, self-interested behaviour.

Regulations make and get made by inevitable, self-interested human behaviour: acquiring social influence (and therefore political power); establishing market dominance and then extracting rent. The behaviour is reflexive, and there are feedback loops here. The regulatory ecosystem is as organic a market and complex a system as the market itself. It is part of the market.

Crypto does not — cannot — stop or fix hard-wired human behaviour. This is the the JC’s main objection to crypto maximalism: it is so glib. God knows the current state of trad-fi isn’t optimal, but it got that way because these are hard, deep, ancient, shape-shifting problems of human social organisation. They cannot just magically solved by code.