On Function and Fracture
On what to do in a world gone mad
In the later pages of Peter Turchin’s book “End Times”, which is best known for its assertion that an overproduction of elites leads to the destabilization of society, he slots in a small fable about the fabulously wealthy Russian industrialist Savva Morozov.
But an important lesson from history is that people living in previous precrisis eras similarly didn’t imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.
Savva Morozov, one of the wealthiest industrialists in prerevolutionary Russia, also couldn’t envision such a disastrous outcome. He was a noted philanthropist and patron of the arts. At his opulent city residence (reputed to be the most expensive mansion in Moscow), he and his wife, Zinaida, entertained the cream of the Russian intelligentsia—famous writers, composers, and scientists.
But Morozov also genuinely cared about the well-being of the workers employed by his textile manufactories. He instituted paid leave for pregnant women workers and stipends for students to study at technical colleges (including some abroad). He built a hospital and a theater for workers. More broadly, he advocated for constitutional reforms, including freedom of the press and of association, universal equality, and public control over the state budget. He was also in favor of the right of workers to join unions and to strike for better pay and working conditions.
Morozov also supported radical parties, including the Bolsheviks. According to later reports, he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles (an enormous sum at the time) to the revolutionaries. He single-handedly financed the publication of Iskra, or The Spark, an underground newspaper published by the banned Social Democratic Party, which later evolved into the Russian Communist Party. […]
When the first revolution broke out in January of 1905, the spiral of radical violence and state repression shocked Morozov. Unable to influence events, Morozov had a nervous breakdown and descended into depression. Following the advice of his doctors and family, he traveled with his wife to the French Riviera to undergo psychiatric treatment. But after checking into a hotel in Cannes, he apparently committed suicide by shooting himself with a handgun, although later there were persistent rumors that he was, in fact, murdered and his suicide staged.
His wife, Zinaida, returned to Russia, where she continued to enjoy the huge fortune left to her by her husband. But her good life ended with the second revolution in 1917. The Bolsheviks confiscated all of her property, leaving her penniless.
Source: Peter Turchin, “End Times”
Savva was kind. Savva was powerful. He was well-connected, and well-mannered, and apparently beloved by all. And yet the world did not care to blink twice before swallowing him whole.
After reading that deeply brutal passage, it is hard not to connect the dots between the world he inhabited, and the world we see hurtling towards us. The specter of AI looms for the mild-mannered; the pull of consumer-fed addiction smears its hands on the weak and gullible; the searing of the planet promises to poison paradise; and the clash of titans threatens to bludgeon the rest. So where do we go from here?
On one hand, it’s easy to despair. If someone as well constituted as the Morozovs were ruthlessly fed into the machinery of revolution, what hope does the average layman have? Or even better, how about the white collar colony that most of us on here flit through?
I’ve often played a funny game since I’ve left college, because, deep down, I’m questioned the usefulness of my labor a few times, especially as I’ve worked countless night to send a report that will go to god knows who. The game goes like this: Whenever you see someone at work, ask yourself - Does this job really make society better? Or even better - Would this work find purpose in the apocalypse? Pretend for a moment that the underpinnings of the economy comes undone tomorrow. Would that person, posting videos online, trading stocks, churning out think pieces on their poorly subscribed Substack, find their work as valued in the collapse? Probably not. The end of the world strips away all that is frivolous, and esteems only the necessary.
Catastrophizing? On some level, definitely. The high-fructose consumption of media in our day and age is admittedly reactionary, but there’s some basis of truth here: AI is poised to unleash displacement in our medium-term future. The great powers of our world are turning inwards, bickering. Climate change is gradually eating away at our planetary ecosystem. So it’s fair to despair. When that kind of cocktail is brewing around you, it feels almost silly to engage with sending emails and filing reports.
In response, some may ruthlessly gobble up capital, turn inwards, or build up safe-houses to insure themselves. We’re constantly being fed advice on what to do in a post-singularity world:
Mo believes AI will trigger a turbulent 15-year period of social and economic upheaval as it rapidly replaces most human jobs and outpaces our ability to manage it. He warns that while the long-term potential of AI may be positive, we’re currently “raising a sentient being by accident” without the ethics or foresight to guide it responsibly. In short “the next 15 years are going to be hell... before we get to heaven.”
Of interest, Mo thinks only five types of jobs will survive:
Jobs that require human connection (e.g. therapists, nurses)
Jobs in innovation and creativity
Strategic leadership and ethical governance
Jobs that require dexterity in unpredictable environments (e.g. plumbing)
Jobs that manage or regulate AI itself
Source: People vs Algorithms “This is How Smart People are Prepping for the Algorithm Era” (Emphasis added by author)
These are the jobs, the functions, that most agree on will persist in the clearing as the fire of cheap intelligence razes the current economy, but you can also expand this to include other catastrophes as well. The global economy we inhabit is build on an interconnected set of levers that allow us to specialize, specializes, specialize. Once that condition of complexity stops prevailing, the niche we currently finds ourselves in widen into something beguiling. What will remain well-grounded even then?
I think the answer for all of these conundrums is to serrate away the fat, and cleave right into the core splinter of our soul: What truly matters?
The response: Community, relationship building, and inner reflections on what is right and just are what will be carrying traits in the future.
If an AI can whip up an app, any model, faster than a human nowadays, then what will differentiate ourselves on? If the world burns, or war erupts from the friction of egos, what traits will hold sway even then? I believe the answer to be what I pointed out above - a constant cycle of renegotiating and soul-searching, of building pacts, inspiring love and loyalty, communicating, and allocating what is there for our constituents. In other words, everything that makes us human.
***
To expand on this, there’s an essay by Miya Perry on Palladium that I keep coming back to as a touch-point, titled “Everyone’s Existential Crisis”, that deftly weaves in these points. In essence, she argues that a sense of meaningless, a paucity of collective narratives is slowly sapping out society. What she proposes is that a breakdown in epistemology (how we know what we know) is upstream of this crisis. With the shattering of shared truths and knowledge, it becomes difficult, nay, potentially impossible, to build shared narratives or cultural myths that inspire people. What then occurs is existential drift that morphs into gangrenous rot. As Miya describes:
Of course, it is one thing to say this, and it’s another to live it. The misfire of this epistemic machinery is experienced as an existential crisis. It is the breakdown of the sense of telos and of motivation, followed by some sequence of depression and manic grasping for a new framework. In California, the blossoming of a thousand startups with charismatic leaders and narratives about changing the world was partially enabled by the existence of a workforce so desperate for meaning that they were willing to work long work weeks for low pay in exchange for a sense of social telos.
Source: Miya Perry, “Everyone’s Existential Crisis” (Emphasis added by author)
To combat this, Miya offers up a narrative, a mother and her child, sewing socks together in a larger group with the mother’s friends. They are sewing the socks for soldiers in a far off war. At the surface, this is a noble task - the soldiers are out there fighting, for their protection, and the socks that are being made will aid in their efforts. All parties involved should find this activity rewarding.
So they talk and sew, socks in hand. But the experiences of the mother and daughter diverge drastically, despite performing the same activities. Why? Because her mother engages in the salon, talking and chatting away with her friends, swapping gossip and pointers. Her daughter, feeling less at ease with the friends, finds their talk alienating to her. As Miya explains:
Now, notice that if we clear out the narrative elements, which is to say, all of the premises that are not based on direct personal experience, the mother’s motivation to do an otherwise “meaningless” activity arises from a rewarding relationship with her friends—who are not there at the time but are still taking attentional precedence over the daughter—while the daughter’s lack of motivation to do the same activity arises from an unrewarding relationship with her mother.
Source: Miya Perry, “Everyone’s Existential Crisis” (Emphasis added by author)
And so she sums up her thesis succintly here:
There is no story the little girl can tell herself about the socks that will address the real problem, and likewise, there is something deeply backwards about the narrative-first approach that we are running. The quest for meaning is really the quest not to be alone. When our motivation crashes, it crashes because we realize that the reward landscape does not contain the things we really want, and what we really want is each other.
Source: Miya Perry, “Everyone’s Existential Crisis” (Emphasis added by author)
What drives meaning is not the act, but the relationship it kindles; sock sewing be damned - what matters is the relationship that buds between mother and daughter. The narratives that Miya writes about - propagated by cheap showmen running startups in Silicon Valley - are too brittle to hold weight unless they offer a deeper relational nourishment, no matter how grand they might be.
Instead, what she suggests is to ground ourselves in direct knowledge, to place our roots at the base of our interactions with people, and let the narrative grow as the relationships strengthen. By addressing our emotional needs first - Miya refers to this as “deficits” in our relationships - it allows us to take the world head on, and form our own beliefs from that.
So what I’ve come to realize is that the great macro shifts of our era will still leave this last problem of meaningless untouched. It still gives us room to navigate and tap into our humanity - the last vestige that will remain unvarnished even as the word storms around us. What can replace the touch of human connection? What would dare to break it?
And I think this is an apt thing to talk about now. America is shuffling through a loneliness crisis. The former surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote a book about it. Every respectable outlet is talking about it. In a bristling analysis, the Chinese CCP chairman Wang Huning noted that technology has fragmented American society, slotting them off to individual nodes in the “great societal machine”:
For all of its boons, the America that Wang Huning visits is a place of deep social isolation. Tocqueville mused that “if an American were to be reduced to minding only his own business, he would be deprived of half of his existence; he would experience it as a gaping void in his life and would become unbelievably unhappy.” In Wang’s America this is not a potential future but a present reality. 20th century Americans spend most of their time employed in bastions of “egoism” [自我主义]. As their work is conceived of as a “a purely technical or material activity” employees are denied both “sentimental and spiritual communion” with other human beings. But if modernization has changed man’s working conditions it does not seem to have changed his nature. Human connection is a human need. Thus the “socially imposed loneliness” of American life creates a people prone to “dejection, loss, indecision, despondence, anxiety, and worry.” In contrast to Tocqueville’s Americans, who “perfected the art of pursuing in concert the aim of their desires,” Wang believes that social isolation has fostered “a sort of introverted and passive mentality” that makes it difficult for the Americans that Wang meets to work with strangers.
Source: “American Nightmares: Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Dark Visions of the Future” (Emphasis added by author)
So as humans, and especially Americans, keep working on their grand narratives (American Dynamism! Living forever! Going to space! Beating the other political party - or the Chinese), what I’m not surprised to hear about is the social contract fraying, people reporting greater and greater numbers of feeling isolated, depressed, and burnt out. As Miya predicted, the great scaffolding of our ebullient career narratives shatter as our personal deficits grow. We seek these grand stories as an antidote to our emptiness, but the depths of our misery can seep boundlessly deep.
Instead, as a solution, the word I keep coming back to is governance. Not the technocratic, soulless, wonkish way people seem to think governments should be run. Not the bitter, partisan fighting that seems to run through our screens everyday. No, I’m talking about the hard work of community building, of establishing relationships that mutually benefits both, of understanding the way groups should be structured to foster collaboration, trust, and meaningful work. Governance in my eyes is an act of care, not subordination, of putting skin in the game with your fellow man. It is a craft, not an occupation.
***
In the first half of this essay, I pounded the table for the economic utility of human connection. Now in the second half, I’m tying it in with the emotional utility that it serves us as well. This feels like such an obvious thing to say, but I wanted to make it crystal clear: In the coming wars of labor displacement, political violence, and continued backslide to meaningless, the answer to survive is simply the same - build a nest of relationships, and emphasize community in your toils.
And it’s led me to re-evaluate my more cynical positions: Our current work, as far flung as it may seem to be from our selves, as alienating as it might be at times, has the shades of our bare-bones past upon closer inspection, because in a way, we have always been trying to connect, or sell our ability to connect, comfort, and satiate our fellow people.
That influencer? Selling a human touch to a product, a tactic even used by ancient Roman merchants to sell wine. The stock-trader? Pricing arbitrage serves to serve economic equality for everyone, the same way a Byzantine grain merchant might profit off of two disconnected markets. Lawyer? The fist of gavel maintains value in any generation. The first profession may have been prostitution, but surely the second profession must have been lawyer, to ban prostitution, at the behest of the angry wives. Our work, as ridiculous as some may seem nowadays as they become increasingly niche, twist and turn to to affirm and re-affirm the social contract that builds the community, that governs.
But it’s important to not lose sight of our shared human condition as we work, though I suspect it gets easier the farther removed you are from the results of your work. What happens when that influencer leverages their touch to pass off faulty products? What happens when a lawyer betrays their ethics for gain?
So I’d imagine if we want to build the future Miya refers to, if we want to entrench ourselves before the oncoming torrent, intentional nudging to get ourselves to build those relational base loads will be the key for resilience.
For my own career, this sea-change is why I’ve grown to appreciate finance, especially as I’ve started working at startups where perhaps my work weighs a bit more. It all came to me recently like a lightning bolt: Finance is the cleanest proxy for governance. That’s it. You measure the accounts, take stock of the cash burn, understand how the storm of the market may batter your operation, and negotiate terms with suppliers, contractors, financiers etc. Price is simply a mechanism of value, a lantern to illuminate the hearts of those who partake. It’s up to you, as the head of finance, to understand what serves the needs of your opposition, your team, and figure out the best way to allocate the haul. In the new dawn of AI, modeling won’t be enough. Coalition building will be. For instance, a tighter covenant might put your lenders at ease, but constrict the nature of your operations - finding a careful balance has always been at the crux of humanity.
It’s a craft I didn’t appreciate until now, but it’s now all I see in the work we do and have ever done. Good relationships, sewn together by compromise, understanding, and curiosity, begets good governance. Same as it ever was.
Well done