Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

"Who can say what the future may bring,
Will it cause us to weep or cause us to sing?
I don't believe in predestined fate,
The future will be what we choose to create."
— Anthem for the Ama-gi, 2000

The future is unwritten.  Every science fiction film fan remembers that line from the second film in the Terminator series.  Of course, some futures are more likely than others, given the nature of time and events.  Nor is it the case that only we humans are involved in the creation of the future.  All volitional entities are involved in choice-taking and, therefore, in future-making.  The following outline is based on the view from AD 10,000 or about eight thousand years in the future.

Wrong Paths

One of the things we've learned since the 21st Century began is how many times mankind has gone through this process.  People get certain things right away, like manufacturing, agriculture, gathering places.  Artisans gain skills, tools for making tools improve, and before long you have an industrial revolution.  Advances in industry lead to advances in other knowledge and before long people have control over chemistry, biology, physics, and parts of quantum reality.

The problem is hierarchies keep forming, and people keep falling into that mode.  Enlightened beings show them the folly of that path and are ignored.  A small number of hierarchs create great situations for themselves, misery for everyone else.  These paths always lead to jealousies and destructive impulses.  There are no stable human hierarchies.  Dynamic instability always shows up and always leads to global cataclysm.

It hasn't mattered whether enlightenment was presented by an elephant-headed being such as Ganesha, or a heron-headed being like Thoth, the concept of a vast number of humans all having great power, great knowledge, and the opportunities inherent in self sovereignty kept on not being accepted.  So cataclysms, some natural, some induced by the more advanced beings themselves, and some induced by insurrection amongst those kept permanently downtrodden have been the end points of one civilisation after another going back hundreds of thousands of years. 

The imagined benefits of hierarchy keep being presented as ideal societies.  Plato's Republic is an example and there are many others.  A managed society where a few guide and manipulate the many and keep all the best things for themselves has a very strong allure to a certain type of mind.  Biological examples in bees, ants, and other species are sometimes pointed to as illustrating that it is natural for some to serve while others rule.  Or as Jefferson said, for some to believe they are meant to saddle and ride the others.

Among the problems of these limitations is the fragility of such systems.  When everyone has the tools needed to fix all of the machines and the knowledge of how they work, systems remain in operation much longer and are brought back into readiness quickly by whoever happens to be nearby.  But when manufacturers seek to eke out a small extra profit by requiring a special tool to perform basic maintenance, as with early 21st Century computers, cars, tablets, and other systems, all manner of fragility is built in.  Now only people with access to the tool can do routine maintenance, and when the tool becomes widely available, new fasteners with even more diabolical features are used to keep people out of their own gear.  Madness ensues.

No amount of popular wisdom seems to bring about abandonment of hierarchy and the establishment of anti-fragile alternatives.   Decentralisation only became popular one time in the dozens of civilisations we've learned about in humanity's eons-long presence on Earth.   Happily, it only needed the one time.

It was not sayings like "for want of a nail, a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse a battle was lost, for want of a victory a king was lost," that ultimately broke the cycle of misery.  Such sayings typically leave out the farrier who needs to know how to heat the shoe, forge the nails, and size and install them, for example.  Goodness knows it was a rare king in human history who bothered to be a skilled blacksmith.

Status

One of the perils of mankind has been status.  People seek status and seek to keep others down so that their own status can seem that much greater.  So enlightenment, this time from a human-headed being named Jesus brought the idea that status was a disgrace.  All of your brothers and sisters on Earth are your neighbours and deserve your kindness, love, and respect.  Dominating others and keeping them subjugated is not only terrible for those subjugated, but poisonous to the spirits of those who are further up the hierarchy, and most poisonous to those at the very top.

Status-seeking and empire-building behaviours have been the bane of human existence.  Very often, these concepts have been embedded in cultures linguistically.  Happily, English as a language was developed without any authority, at first because for about two centuries it was the jargon of a subjugated people and then because scholars in that society wanted to avoid the rigours of Latin, the language of hierarchy in their culture.  Words can be invented, nouns can be verbed, and grammar is entirely ad hoc.  Even usage changes over time with jet being a dark colour, then a stream of water, then a type of aircraft, without anyone being harmed by the transitions.

Another pathway toward hierarchy and its degradation has been through religion.  Ancient religions were fraught with peril because they taught that the weak should serve the strong, the few should govern the many, the priests should be privileged, and all must obey.  The Protestant reformation was a key turning point in bringing back the intentional egalitarian views of Jesus.  Ordinary languages became acceptable for use in gathered churches rather than the hierarchical Latin.   Learning to read and write became fashionable as the printing press revolutionised the distribution and decentralisation of knowledge.

Filtration

Another major development came from mass migrations which selected for certain personality types.  Many people moved from Europe to North and South America during a time when biological immunities in the indigenous populations were insufficient to maintain their numbers.  So Aztec and Incan empires were depopulated by smallpox and other empires replaced them.  Many of these new empires were extremely hierarchical, due to the presence and attraction of gold and silver. 

However, in British colonies in North America there wasn't easily located mineral wealth.  So the people who came to those places were ones willing to struggle to make crops of tobacco and other plants, or willing to explore wilderness areas for furs, or willing to trade with native peoples for crafts or opportunities, or willing to build factories and invent new things.  The development of an entire culture focused on new opportunities eventually made chattel slavery obsolete, and abolition was one of the key attacks on hierarchy that really mattered.

By establishing the concept that everyone should be equal before the law, and by having at the same time the concept that the law should have limited powers, Americans made huge strides.  They also had been selecting for frontier opportunists who were similarly willing to develop skills, take risks, and push West.  By the time people began populating the free mountain West in earnest, a given pioneer family needed an array of tools and skills in sewing, cooking, crafting, digging, ploughing, skinning, tanning, and so forth.  One or two families would be able to set up a new community along a trade route and near a wilderness, thanks to developments in technologies and decentralisation.  A culture where literacy was prized and widely available, where books such as the bible and the collected works of Shakespeare were commonly appreciated, and where a person would be judged by the content of their character, their honesty and decency, developed very rapidly.

Toner Wars

The decentralisation revolution that began with the Internet in the late 1960s and the open source cryptography and the free software movements of the 1980s, and was followed by the crypto-anarchists of the 1980s through present, culminating in the economics of decentralised authority through crypto-currencies was a huge boon to mankind.  Very quickly, computer controlled milling and manufacturing became readily available, morphed into 3D printing of prototypes and then tools of all kinds, and before long people could replace a specialised tool with a weird end effector without having to go to the dealership that wanted to have all the repairs go through them.

These happy days were not unalloyed, though, as the desire for control had remained strong within those hierarchies that had survived Protestant, printing, industrial, and information revolutions.  Technologists who dreamed of being in charge of humanity built autonomous robotic systems, miniaturised them, and sent them out among mankind as slaughter bots.  Millions of tiny drones would occupy a city, identify targets by facial recognition, or in some cases ethnic phenotype, and use a shaped charge to rapidly kill. 

Miniaturisation proceeded rapidly and soon there were nano-bots that were smart dust, distributed by aerosol or simply blown around by the winds.  These devices became the toner of the toner wars.   Trillions of competing toner bots would fight for dominance outside the safe zones kept clear by smart filtration systems.  Many of these toner bots were von Neumann devices, meaning that they would not only perform their main function but would also convert nearby materials to more copies of themselves, growing exponentially and by polynomial expansion curves to incredible numbers. 

Electro-magnetic pulse defences were helpful at times, but radiation hardening led to a toner arms race where incredibly powerful designs were able to overwhelm and dominate other designs of toner.  The toner wars were really just another symptom of the status wars. 

Free Nets

Examples like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden pointed the way to the need for information distribution through encrypted systems.  Encrypted voice over IP systems made international long distance toll charges a thing of the past.  All kinds of mesh networks, WisprNet systems, drone-based data store and forward networks, and self-extending wireless networks based on micro-payment incentivised network routers created enormous parallel data and communication networks very rapidly.

These free nets were the places where the revolutionary cadres formed, grew, morphed, died back, and rose again.  Agorism, decentralisation, and anti-fragility were their watchwords. 

Soon, fundamental methods of control, such as licence tags and patrolling police vehicles were overwhelmed by electronic and physical counter-measures.  Very quickly these were limited to non-lethal approaches, so that very few police were permanently harmed, even as their "cruisers" were disabled and isolated from communicating.  Online networks which used censorship to limit popularity or restrict discussions were replaced by diverse alternatives, and quickly went out of business.

Before long, 3D printed air cars and rocket systems were available and the resources of the Solar System came into play.  People were no longer tied up in traffic for hours every day, nor limited to just one planetary surface, or any planet's gravity well if they didn't want to be.  Artificial space colonies with independent ecologies were suddenly all over the sky, at various distances from Earth, and then at various distances from the Sun.  Population growth on these new empty lands was at an enormous rate, because all organisms exhibit enhanced fertility in the presence of abundance.

Trillions of Us

With an entire Solar System in which to play, work, and grow, mankind became a very diverse and numerous species.  Late in the 21st Century the first extra-Solar vessels set off with frozen embryos and stasis systems for crew, and were soon able to deploy quantum teleportation systems all over the 25,000 star systems within a hundred light years of Earth.  All knowledge was available to nearly anyone from a young age, and smart systems were adapted to help people learn and change and grow.

We solved the problems of hierarchy and we avoided doom.   This one time we escaped the cycle of destruction.  And with our recently developed abilities to travel through time and across time lines, we have sent back enlightened beings to help and guide the past civilisations that were abortive, but important for our development.  There are parallel time tracks where all these choices were taken 300,000 years ago, and they have some wonderful ideas and information to share.

The great future ahead of us is amazing.  Where we go from here has no limits.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, actor, and traveller.  He is working with Carl Mullan on a new DigitalGoldMag.com publishing project, with Chris Boehr on a Science of Society Foundation and a 3D printed structures business for refugee housing and self-storage.   He has friends who sell bitcoin in ten thousand btc wallets, diamonds of all colours, gold, fine art, and luxury real estate, to whom he is happy to introduce you.  Jim has been involved in metal recycling, lawn care, carpentry, banking, real estate development, software development, free port development, toll road development, digital gold, private stock exchanges, and many other ventures.  You can find him at ResilientWays.net or on Twitter.com/planetaryjim or on Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp.