Thought Shrapnel

This is an incredible read, and I’d encourage you to set aside the time to do so. I’m old so I literally printed it out to give it the attention it deserves.

Cade Diehm, founder of New Design Congress, explains where we’re at. It’s a long essay, so this post is going to be longer than your average Thought Shrapnel post.

Diehm argues that last year, there were a couple of long-standing trends which combined. Each trend had multiple sub-trends:

First, the rise of techno-authoritarianism was enabled by elite overproduction causing white-collar workers to lean right.

For nearly fifteen years, victories that civil society had considered impossible just… kept happening. Brexit was a shock. Trump 2016 was a shock. Bolsonaro was a shock. Each time, the same institutions that had failed to predict the previous “impossible” outcome confidently assured everyone that they had learned from their mistakes and could now see clearly. Each time, they were wrong in precisely the same way. The unthinkable – which was becoming very fucking thinkable even before large swathes of the ‘old country’ voted to destroy its own economy and isolate itself from the European Union – should have been at the forefront of everyone’s minds. It just wasn’t.

Meanwhile, the post-COVID and post-DOGE structural collapse of a “professionalised” civil society infrastructure (which had long since lost touch with reality) means that frustrated “counter-elites” are willing to stand and watch it all burn. They are guided intellectually by figures like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land who normalise the idea that “democracy is theatre” and that technology should “operate beyond democratic control”.

What the first half of the 2020s demonstrated something worse than incompetence or moral failure: Civil society had become structurally incapable of seeing anything beyond its own comforts, its own reporting metrics, and its own operational assumptions. The same adversary returned, better organised, and far better prepared. What the authoritarian apparatus met was a civil society architecture that had not truly hardened in response, because civil society had lost the capacity to respond to material conditions. Civil society’s collapse displaced precisely the people who had assumed their positions were permanent.

And in that collapse, you can hear clearly the death rattle of Cold War economics, the spectacular end to Fukuyama’s short-lived End of History pinkie-promise. Some institutions fell to earth without even a whimper, their directors discovering one morning that decades of carefully cultivated influence had evaporated overnight.

Others – and I speak to you plainly from painful and intimate experience – turned cannibal. Without shame or decorum, they devoured their allies and their own children in desperate, grotesque attempts to survive another quarter. What they all have in common is a shared façade of legitimacy, resilience, and insight. Each came down with spectacular clarity, each a wingless fuselage, quietly descending to the depths of the ocean floor.

At the same time, a new tech frontier has been enabled through LLMs, crypto, and digital identity. It’s an opaque enforcement infrastructure used by elites use to create what Diehm calls a “boom‑extract‑enforce” cycle. They launch new systems, extract value through artificial scarcity, then lock people by making them too embedded (and technically complex) to contest.

But why technology, and why now? There are many reasons – thresholds of money, structure, and discipline, yes – but also because the new generation of tech is a distinct lineup: large language models, the metaverse, cryptography, cryptocurrency, digital identity, and quantum computing. Together, they form an uninterpretable frontier that simultaneously penetrates everything while remaining incomprehensible to democratic oversight.

However, as Diehm notes, all is not lost. All of this is materially fragile, dependent on vulnerable physical infrastructure, as shown by MR CHOPPY:

The technobros and the shell-shocked civil-society actor alike are incapable of seeing the contradiction they both agree on: physical infrastructure as immaterial and disposable despite its precarious fragility while simultaneously fetishising the copyable, hackable, unstable, and constantly degrading contents of the digital as resilient, transcendent, and handed down from God himself.

Also, the same elite overproduction which creates techno‑authoritarians also produces what Diehm calls “fallen angels” which are displaced insiders with capital, skills and a sense of betrayal. They are now reachable directly, without having to go via NGOs. So what he proposes is to build “post‑institutions” which can briefly described as low‑overhead, infrastructure‑independent, venue‑less, “deletable” forms of organisation. Thse prioritise discretion, direct relationships and guaranteed exit, offering alternative power bases rather than trying to revive the hollowed‑out civil‑society model.

Source: New Design Congress

Image: Tiana Attride