Whatever their differences, there seems to be broad agreement that we’re in a moment of political flux and that the debates of today are unlikely to

Political Ideologies for the 21st Century

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2022-06-22 20:30:03

Whatever their differences, there seems to be broad agreement that we’re in a moment of political flux and that the debates of today are unlikely to persist in the coming decades. Some see an inevitable future of world-spanning super-intelligences and others radical crypto-powered decentralization. But you don’t have to embrace such determinism to believe (like Yuval Noah Harari) that only ideologies that have a coherent vision of the future of technology (just as Fascism, Communism and Democracy did in the 20th century) are likely to thrive.

A natural place to look for candidates for such technology-ideology pairs is Sid Meier’s Civilization, the best-selling strategy game of all time. The game has usually featured a variety of types of government to choose from: for example, in the Classical era Oligarchy, Classical Republic or Autocracy. Yet the latest expansion of the latest iteration of the game (Gathering Storm for Civ VI) projects into the future, offering a choice of Corporate Libertarianism, Digital Democracy, or Synthetic Technocracy.

Without taking a computer game too seriously, there is a logic to the way they carve up ideological space. In this document, I take their thinking and run with it, attempting to be fair to the self-understanding of each group and thus to welcome collaboration and critique from those who feel they generally identify with the camps. At the same time, I primarily wrote this document, and no one will be confused about which camp I identify with; last week I released something of a mission statement for Digital Democracy/Plurality/pluralism. As with any classifications of political beliefs, most people will find themselves somewhere in the middle of these groupings (as pictured in the diagram below) and many will find that even the space spanned by them captures only some elements of their views. Nonetheless, I believe classification is useful to allow those outside these debates about the future of governance an entry point into them. Debates about a distant future are often confusing and obscure, so I hope this may help simplify them.

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