Our Ancient Future

So You Want to Work in Hardware

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Are you a software engineer undergoing an existential crisis every time you open social media? Do you fear that Claude Code has made you irrelevant? Are you idly entertaining previously unthinkable alternatives like the trades? Did you study software believing it was the most reliable path to a middle-class life in America, only to be faced with high new-grad unemployment rates, management directives for developer “efficiency”, and AI doom-mongering? You might be thinking about career pivots.

The last few months have been demoralizing for software engineers. At this point LLMs can pump out decent Python code, and agents can compile it, test it, and deploy it in an autonomous loop. A good engineer can still do it better, but plenty of executives who have never heard the phrase “technical debt” believe they can plunge ahead and reduce the number of highly-paid developers on their staff. And there are many, many highly-paid developers in the US, and many more clamoring to join the most successful sector of the century.

There has likely been an oversupply of programmers since the 2010s, the glory days of Learn to Code. As 2016 nostalgia memes remind us, you could once catapult yourself into a six-figure job with nothing more than a few months of prep work on Leetcode. No college degree or strong handshake required. It all reached a peak in 2020, when big software companies went on a zero-interest-rate-induced hiring frenzy, and things have gone downhill from there.

What to do?

Maybe you could just “learn AI!” This could either mean you learn how to use AI, or learn how to develop AI.

On the AI user side, you mostly benefit if you already have senior-level understanding of a system and deep familiarity with its design choices. These people really do gain a lot from agentic coding systems. If you find yourself struggling to stand out among a sea of juniors, your awesome prompting skills are unlikely to distinguish you.

Meanwhile, becoming an AI developer requires postgraduate degrees, an insane work ethic, and a decade of experience in the dark art of training models. This is the hottest frontier in scientific research today, and as we sit here wondering how to fluff up our resume, a prestigious Stanford lab has already graduated another psychotically focused reinforcement learning expert grinding for their next lottery ticket at Anthropic. Those fancy jobs building AI models get pro sports-level pay packages from Mark Zuckerberg because they require pro sports-level dedication and experience from the most insane strivers in America.

What else is there besides software? The other default professional careers–law, medicine, finance–already groan with overcapacity. Most long ago started filtering out the potential pool with postgraduate degrees. No 6-week bootcamps for oncology, sadly. Besides, Claude Code will surely shrink the number of workers in those fields too.

What about something AI can’t do? Something physical!

Maybe, while doomscrolling AI doom articles, you have looked down at your disappointingly human fingers and realized they are holding a physical piece of hardware. That could be an option. At least you know something about computers already. It’s certainly more appealing than The Trades. You, a software engineer, can’t seriously think you are going to become an electrician. Just consider the culture fit if you became a tradesman–actually, don’t use words like “culture fit” in the trades. Don’t join the trades. Consider hardware. Hardware engineers probably won’t mock you in Spanish for showing up to a work site in a puffer jacket and Allbirds.

The tech drones of Office Space found meaning on a construction site

Many macroeconomic arrows seem to point towards hardware as well. For one, hardware engineering cannot be replaced by AI. We will perfect robots that can lift crates long before we invent one that can debug a busted oscillator on a PCB. Even the parts of the job that can theoretically be automated (PCB layout, digital circuit design, embedded programming) relies on long, slow cycles involving prototyping, laborious real-world testing, manufacturing, and reliability. Claude can instantly test its codeslop and correct errors with the help of compilers and interpreters. The same is not true for a vibe-designed circuit board.

Not only that, but the closer you get to hardware, the worse the automation tools get. Claude Code works quite well for those scripting tools, but it fails catastrophically when I try to use it to help with firmware. Documentation remains spotty and difficult to scrape for online bots. Most hardware and firmware knowledge either lives on decades-old forums that you have to unearth, or in the gray-haired heads of principal engineers. The FOSS movement never made much of a dent in firmware, meaning a huge amount of this code is proprietary and not available to train an AI. Circuit designs are even less publicly available. For now, the amount of effort and money required to just find the appropriate data to train an AI model in hardware or firmware design remains extremely daunting.

Geopolitically, too, America seems to have woken up from the decades-long delusion that All You Need is Software. Old-fashioned concepts like great power politics, war, and industrial capacity have returned in a big way in the 2020s. If software companies thrive on globalization, hardware companies thrive on de-globalization. While the public AI boosters keep bleating that the real race with China is for AGI, governments, investment banks, and venture capitalists have begun throwing investment into robots, drones, and other Hard Tech. And even the AI dreamers are finding that real-world constraints like RAM, energy, and cooling capacity constrain AI as much as model performance does.

It isn’t clear whether we can really reshore industry, or make the US equal China in its industrial might. But the pendulum has clearly begun to swing back.

If you are considering hardware as a career, I can give you highly cynical and highly accurate advice. I have not yet started a scammy career consulting business, so I will give my thoughts for free.

I have worked in hardware in the Bay Area for about 8 years now. I have worked on radar sensors, self-driving cars, brain stimulation systems, and surgical robots. I graduated from one of America’s top engineering schools with really good grades. Consider this the equivalent of basketball advice from a Division I college player who rode the bench all 4 years, started in a few midseason games when a teammate had mono, and once made a pass to the star player for a game-winning shot over Chico State.

I have also spent most of my career being outearned and outshined in Silicon Valley by the Software Guys. I graduated in the heart of the Learn to Code era. In the 2010s you could get a job out of college at a FAANG company doing software engineering and immediately earn $200k. Even boot camp graduates could find lucrative remote jobs after only a few months of coding experience.

Of course the software boom predates the 2010s. The topic of the day varied: as a child in the 2000s, the hot thing was web development. Then it shifted into mobile app development in the early 2010s, then it was data science in the mid-2010s. But the common factor was always software.

If you were a little more far-seeing, you might have started working on AI back in the 2010s, or rather “machine learning,” as it was called back then when AI was still more of a sci-fi term that sober businesses avoided. If I was really smart, I probably would have done that. My friends from that time who got into AI labs and stuck with it have continued to out-earn me, and now receive the most intense spotlight ever given to any tech industry since ChatGPT dropped.

Instead I studied hardware. It was not a great idea at the time. I did it mostly out of contrarianism, a general intuition that I shouldn’t do what everyone else is doing. I also had a vague sense of mens et manus, mind and hand. Coders can rebrand themselves as “builders,” but humans with tangible bodies respect those who build tangible things, things you can hold and touch and examine like the apes in 2001. I had a somewhat macho sense at a young age that I should be building something real, not a B2B SaaS company! Of course B2B SaaS rewards you with money, while hardware rewards you with lots of time on an oscilloscope.

But now the patron saints of B2B SaaS are announcing that it is “time to build.”

I should be gloating. A shift to hardware should mean a philosophical victory, a win for reality over illusion, materials over vagueness.

I have adopted a wait-and-see attitude instead. Crypto conmen and AI grifters still run the economy–they’ll figure out some way to create FTX for batteries. I don’t foresee a Socialist Realism future of musclebound Rosie the Riveters waving American flags as they build armies of robots. In this America, illusion will always triumph over substance.

Still, I can’t deny that interest in hardware and “deep tech” has skyrocketed recently, and that the field looks like a safe haven for white-collar workers who might be replaced by agent swarms.

So you want to work in hardware. What do you need to know?

First of all, it’s hard. Obviously. Everyone says this. The very things that make it difficult to automate make it difficult to do. The real world is far less deterministic than a computer processor. Although software tends to be buggy and unreliable, an actual computer chip can execute billions of instructions per second without ever making a mistake, making them among the most reliable devices ever invented. If your code fails, you can be quite sure that the problem is not the machine executing your code. This is not true for hardware. Easily overlooked details like the length of a screw or the width of a metal plate can cause catastrophic errors. Even harder are errors that come about through the unfortunate stacking of real-world uncertainty. Strange, difficult-to-reproduce Heisenbugs can happen when manufacturing tolerances combine with environmental conditions like heat or water, which combine with user error, which combine with unusual software conditions.

Second, hardware is slow. Products take a long time to design, test, and manufacture. You can’t easily modify a physical product in the way you can fix a line of code. Those slick Agile workflows your boss posts about on LinkedIn, the sprints with new features every week? They don’t work with hardware lifecycles, especially if you build hardware for a regulated industry like automotive, medical, or defense. You have to go back to good old waterfall design.

Hardware also moves slowly in an intellectual sense. Many of the most widely used microprocessors today date back to the 1990s, and fundamental ideas in embedded programming date back to the 1970s. While software engineers feel the need to learn a new framework every year to stay up to date, the advantages in hardware mostly come with experience with the same small set of knowledge. Juniors may not be replaced by AI, but they still face a profound learning curve. Young engineers cannot jump the line by learning a slick new programming language, no matter what the Rust guys claim. By entering hardware, you enter the turf of the graybeard. The rules are different.

Third, the pay is poor. You shouldn’t expect the good old days of the 2010s to return with “edge AI” replacing “B2B SaaS” as the buzzword du jour. The high wages of that era were a historical anomaly.

A friend asked me once why hardware pays so poorly (relative to software) when the skills are in high demand and, at least in the US, somewhat rare. The answer is that hardware simply does not provide the same kind of economics as software does. Peter Thiel, a man who seems to yearn for more substantive Hard Tech developments, also outlined why Hard Tech is a worse business than software in his book Zero To One.

Software requires no cost to reproduce–once it is written, it can be copied indefinitely. The main economy of scale that software benefits from is the network effect of products like Facebook and TikTok. But in general, software margins are very high. Google Search, the greatest product in history, enjoys a profit margin between 75% and 87%. Hardware obeys the same rules of margins that other industries like fashion obey. You get the highest margins with luxury goods and with frontier products. As time goes by, competitors innovate and prices go down, so margins tend to go down too. Best case scenario for profit would be something like ASML, which holds a monopoly on extremely expensive, precisely-engineered semiconductor manufacturing equipment. You won’t get much higher than ASML’s 52% gross margin.

But monopolies in hardware are rare. In software, they are often the rule thanks to those same network effects (and license monopolies, the secret sauce behind the worst software company in the world, Oracle). They are very difficult to maintain in hardware, even if you start with a huge leading advantage. Tesla, for instance, got almost a decade of monopoly over the luxury EV market, but now finds Chinese competitors like BYD cutting into their market share. Nvidia has become the largest company in the world based on its hardware monopoly, but ASICs from competitors have already started cutting into their lead. (Much of Nvidia’s monopoly also comes from its software advantage in CUDA, which is why capable GPUs from competitors like AMD have failed to gain traction.) Even Apple, the most successful hardware company in history, enjoys far from a monopoly in smartphones, especially looking at worldwide figures.

So hardware companies will not equal the kind of profits that Google and Facebook and Microsoft rake in. The average pay that a bootcamp graduate in the 2010s enjoyed will not return. Of course, this used to be uncommon in Silicon Valley too. Before the dotcom boom of the 90s, back when Silicon Valley actually made silicon, engineers were paid fairly well, but not appreciably better than other professionals. You became an engineer instead of an accountant because you liked computers, not because you hoped to get rich.

Could a resurgence of hardware manufacturing lead to a larger base of more normally-paid professionals? I would like to look forward to a less unequal future for the friendly neighborhood tech bro. Certainly my home, the Bay Area, has been horribly distorted by the presence of a small clique of very highly-paid techies. It would form an ironic end to the AI future, which we all agree will lead to even higher inequality. I can’t predict what would happen if the hard talk about hard tech comes to fruition. The future of hardware has become more unpredictable than it has in decades, and it certainly seems poised to become less staid. Maybe even less boring.

If I make hardware work sound like an annoying hassle, that is because in many ways, it is. Sometimes you drop a screw into a housing and can’t reach your fingers into a tiny slot to pull it out. Sometimes you accidentally touch two wires together and blow up an expensive voltage regulator. It is full of friction, disappointingly slow, and subject to brutal reality checks–the limits of distance, space, and material cost.

That is also the best part about this work. It disconnects you from the Dreamworld of software. The world inside the screen does not seem to obey limits. It compresses distance, reproduces data without cost, and removes friction. Huge organizations work hard to make you forget that this immaterial, instantaneous, magical world relies on electricity, copper, plastic, and rare-earth metals. It is ironic that the closer we seem to get to the incorporeal Machine God, the more these real limits come into focus. Hardware work pushes you up against those real-world limits. The greatest limit we face is the limit of our own body.

Knowledge work in the age of computers privileges information-gathering above all else, and promotes alienation from the body. It denies us even the minor sensory pleasures of sketching lines with a pencil, or scratching numbers onto a pad. It turns us into fleshy appendages of computers.

I remain sanguine about the long-term trajectory of hardware work because it uses the body and the mind. I once wondered what professions still require use of the hands. Surgery? Anthropology? The list is thin. We could use more of them. If “mind and hands” changes from a slogan to an endorsement of humanity’s greatest advantage over AI agents, then hardware will find its place in the sun.

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Superintelligence, superweapons, and Lt. Col. Petrov

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The solution to AI alignment

As we face real global crises such as instability in the Middle East, bloody quagmire in Ukraine, rising inequality, and climate change, many of our best and brightest are spending their time debating an entirely imaginary crisis: alignment of theoretical superintelligent AIs. We may not have any such AGIs right now, and we may never achieve this, but it is certainly more fun to argue about this hypothetical threat than it is to send a letter to our local senator decrying Israeli bombings.

The alignment debate was waged for many decades in the realm of science fiction, where it honestly belongs. (Most people who obsessively discuss AI alignment should probably just get out their anxieties through art). The topic became more popular during the deep learning boom of the 2010s. Still, it was largely confined to the so-called online rationalists, chief among them the eccentric Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter fan-fiction author and founder of an alignment-focused nonprofit. Most serious scientists continued to simply conduct research on AI, as they always had.

The worldwide AI derangement syndrome that gripped the entire business and scientific world beginning in 2022 elevated this from blog talk to a topic of serious debate. But the conditions of the debate were already set. The same strange people who were the first to talk about this–rationalists–have continued to dominate this conversation. So their strange concerns and assumptions get swallowed up by the newcomers who listen to prominent CEOs and researchers stress the importance of AI alignment in articles, podcasts, and alignment-specific companies.

People wonder how we can ensure a superintelligent AI will not do something harmful to us. People wonder if we can program guardrails into the software, like Asimov’s laws of robotics, to prevent it from ever harming us. People wonder if such an AI can possibly be controlled. How could a less intelligent mind control a more intelligent one indefinitely?

Most of all, when people theorize about this insanely powerful source of technology, they think that this much power must inevitably lead to human destruction. It is like putting a loaded gun in the middle of an uncontrollable mob: eventually, it seems that it must be fired. That is its fate, its purpose, its inevitable conclusion.

Obviously in the present moment this is a purely imaginary problem. The tech doesn’t exist. As for the future, there is no guarantee that it will ever exist. Proponents say that the tech has been improving in leaps and bounds recently. By analogy, computer hardware has been improving (a la Moore’s Law) for the last 60 years without fail. Surely we will eventually create this technology.

Projecting limitless improvement into the future has proved quite troublesome in the past, though. AI has a notorious problem with incorrect predictions: every 10 years since the 1950s, a very renowned someone has predicted imminent superintelligence. Technology can certainly plateau: we still use assault rifles designed in the 1940s instead of ray-guns. We have also not achieved the other great mid-century scientific goal besides superintelligence: space colonies. Plenty of smart people in the 60s and 70s spent time debating how exactly humans should handle their imminent expansion to other moons and planets. Sixty years later, those debates remain science fiction.

Wernher von Braun contibuted an article to this edition

But let us grant that such technology may be possible one day. It’s more fun to argue this. The alignment experts warn us that we must debate this because the stakes are too high to just walk blindly into this technology, as we have done with basically all technology in the past. Maybe there is nothing wrong with rolling out something like an automobile to the public and then, after the fact, regulating its use. But AGI is unprecedented, they say. Getting it wrong even once can mean the end of the human race.

Haven’t we heard this before?

We do, in fact, have one precedent for a world-ending, unimaginably powerful piece of technology. That technology is, of course, the nuclear bomb. Studying its history can give us insight into how AGI might play out and how we might best manage it.

Eighty years of superweapons

First of all, we should take a pragmatic point of view: once it is proven to be possible, any highly powerful piece of technology will be developed. That is true regardless of what the academics from debate club say. From the moment Hahn and Strassman discovered nuclear fission in 1938, the road to nukes was open. (One key difference between nuclear weapons and AGI: the mechanism of nuclear fission was theoretically understood from the beginning, while the mechanism of AGI remains unknown. In fact, some believe we will reach AGI without ever understanding its mechanism.)

The implications of Hahn and Strassman’s discovery was understood immediately. It kicked off the first nuclear arms race. This race convinced Allied scientists such as Einstein and Szilard that, regardless of the consequences, atomic bombs must be developed by the US before Germany built one. (This is the same reasoning for developing dangerous AI today, with China replacing Germany.) So virtually no one working on the atomic bomb at the time expressed real reservations about the technology until it was already almost done.

Opposition from nuclear scientists only emerged once the bomb itself was a fait accompli. After the war, a brief movement arose to control the bombs within the United States, then the only nuclear nation. But once the Americans developed the first one, they could not prevent the technology from spreading either–to friend or foe. The Soviet Union detonated their own atomic bomb just 4 years after the United States did, despite strict (albeit compromised) secrecy. Great Britain would detonate their own bomb 3 years after that.

Nuclear non-proliferation has proved fairly ineffective. From a certain point of view one could argue it has been a success because nuclear weapons have not become a widespread weapon of war. But this does not seem to be because of their rarity. Nine different nations (the US, the Soviet Union/Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel), including all five permanent members of the UN Security Council, have current nuclear capacity. Many have held nuclear weapons for decades, during conditions of hot or cold war. Apartheid South Africa developed nuclear weapons as well, but disassembled its arsenal in the late 1980s.

Nuclear proliferation

The anti-nuclear campaign failed to prevent nuclear weapons from being built. It failed to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading to multiple great powers and regional powers. It failed to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the “bad guys”: Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un both control nukes. Despite this it has succeeded in one respect: no nukes have been used in combat for 80 years now.

The obvious question to be asked about nuclear weapons is this: how is it that we have not had a nuclear war? Sure, one could argue that it hasn’t been that long in the grand scheme of things, and that we have just gotten lucky. If so, the human species has the collective luck of a drunk gambler in a casino at 4 AM hitting five blackjacks in a row.

The prognosis for the human race certainly looked grim at the dawn of the nuclear age. If you could put these modern-day rationalists who debate AGI back into the 1940s United States, there is no question that they would predict imminent nuclear apocalypse. You can just picture Eliezer Yudkowsky frantically handing out copies of his zine in 1946 Times Square to anyone who would listen. Kalshi in 1948 would probably predict a 70% chance of nuclear armageddon by the new millennium.

That’s not to denigrate our contemporary alarmists too much; plenty of people at the time, such as the great logician Bertrand Russell, saw nuclear apocalypse as inevitable. Indeed, to a certain type of person with a certain type of mind, it is inevitable. That kind of mind is the rationalist mind. Rationally speaking, nuclear weapons should have been used by now.

The question remains: why haven’t they been used?

The most widespread rational explanation is the concept of mutually assured destruction. The doctrine applies game theory to posit that full-scale use of nuclear weapons by one attacker on a nuclear-armed defender would result in the complete destruction of both parties. Rationally speaking, then, both are deterred from using their weapons on the other. This form of game theory was largely developed by an idol of the rationalists, John von Neumann.

While Oppenheimer burned from guilt, von Neumann said “If you say why not bomb hem tomorrow, I say why not today?”

Von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project and was an enthusiastic proponent of the more powerful hydrogen bomb project. Von Neumann and similar thinkers at the RAND Corporation used mutually assured destruction (MAD) to justify continued nuclear development on the H-bomb. MAD would eventually be explicitly established as doctrine under the leadership of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of John F. Kennedy’s “whiz kids” that tried to govern through rational means. (He did this in 1967, in a speech in–where else–San Francisco.)

That word “rationality” appears again, the technological society’s instinctive response to unknown power. Deterrence theory and MAD are supposed to be rational solutions to the horror of a superweapon. Scenarios involving the deaths of hundreds of millions may be modeled and predicted; peace may be explained. (One wonders why the AGI people don’t come to the same conclusion and advocate that China develop a competing superintelligence, so we can again enjoy peaceful deterrence.)

I don’t dispute that game theory has made some correct points. Yet people played games for millennia without needing the rational contributions of game theory: similarly, governments did not really need the explicit theory of MAD to know that nuclear warfare is a bad idea. MAD is more of an observation of human behavior than a novel insight.

And indeed, MAD alone was insufficient to prevent annihilation. Despite governments following this policy designed to prevent (avoidable) nuclear war, the world came very close to this very outcome several times during the Cold War. In fact, only recently have we appreciated just how close it came. Two specific instances, more than anything else, show exactly how we escaped apocalypse despite having the power to commit it.

Vasya, the Party Secretary told me you saved the world

The first instance came in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This has long been recognized as a situation where the US and the Soviet Union came very close to bombing each other. On October 27, 1962, the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine B-59 was located off the coast of Cuba by a flotilla of American ships. Despite being in international waters, the US Navy began dropping depth charges near the submarine in an attempt to force it to surface. The B-59 had not had any contact from Moscow in several days, and did not know if war had already begun or not. The captain of the submarine, Valentin Savitsky, decided that they were under attack, and decided to launch a nuclear-equipped torpedo. The political officer onboard, Ivan Maslennikov, agreed with the captain. Normally, this would be enough to launch the torpedo. But the B-59, unlike most Soviet nuclear-armed submarines, required the consent of three, not two, officers to authorize a nuclear attack: the captain, the political officer, and the chief of staff of the brigade. This last man, Vasili Arkhipov, did not agree with the others. He argued courageously against the torpedo, eventually convincing Captain Savitsky to surface and await orders from Moscow. The submarine would surface, make contact with a US destroyer, and eventually receive orders from the Soviet fleet to set course back to the USSR. Nuclear catastrophe was averted.

Vasily Arkhipov

Under the circumstances the crew was facing (no orders in days, seeming attack by the enemy in international waters), it would have been quite plausible for the B-59 to launch its torpedoes and begin nuclear conflict. It was Arkhipov who prevented this scenario from playing out. No algorithm, no alignment technique, no game theory: a man.

But a rationalist can still point to the process put in place as working effectively. True, many Soviet submarines needed the consent of only two officers to authorize a nuclear launch. Perhaps a McKinsey consultant looking to optimize this process might argue that all ships should require three officers to consent. But those in favor of rational management can say that the process worked as intended.

The second instance, though, is far more extraordinary. This particular case was not known until fairly recently, and it is very troubling for anyone who seeks to rationally explain our continued survival as a species.

In September 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a bunker near Moscow that housed the command center of the Soviet Union’s early warning satellite systems. His responsibility was to monitor the early-warning network and notify his superiors of any impending nuclear missile attack. If the early-warning systems indicated that inbound missiles were detected, the official policy of the Soviet Union was immediate and compulsory counter-attack against the US. This strategy comes directly from the doctrine of mutually assured destruction: to deviate from this process would invalidate the entire doctrine.

Lt. Col. Petrov was notified by a computer that an inbound ICBM was detected, originating in the US. At this moment, the process was clear: Petrov should have notified his superiors and begun the process of nuclear retaliation. Petrov did not do this. He considered the alert a computer error, since it only detected one missile, and he reasoned that a true attack from the US would involve hundreds of incoming missiles. Petrov did nothing. It is not clear whether he even informed his superiors of this possible false alarm. Nonetheless, no missile seemed to arrive. Later, the computer notified him that four missiles were now incoming. Petrov again dismissed this as a false alarm. Again, he was proven right. The notifications were later confirmed to be erroneous, caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds.

Petrov in his later years

To a manager, this looks like a disaster. The process failed. Moreover, Petrov deliberately disobeyed his orders and defied the established process–no doubt a process determined by hours of deliberation by very smart, rational people.

If Petrov was working in Silicon Valley, he would probably be fired or reprimanded. He would have definitely been reamed by a middle manager for not notifying his superior–as someone who has taken a lot of corporate training courses, I can assure you that you are always supposed to notify your manager in these situations.

Petrov was indeed intensely questioned by his Soviet superiors. He received no reward for his actions, and was actually reprimanded for improper filing of paperwork. Petrov was reassigned to a less sensitive post, took early retirement, and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown. Such is the fate of those who defy the rational system.

If the rationalists-in-charge had had their way, the process would have been followed, MAD would be observed, and our planet would be a smoking ruin right now.

Planning and policy for thermonuclear war

Rationalists dedicate their lives to designing policies that eliminate human error. Here we see what appears to be a case of human error: Petrov, the human, did not do what he should have done. The entire point of a process is to prevent the vagaries of human decision and make sure that people do not get in the way of what should be done. The alignment debate seeks precisely to design rational processes that use computers to prevent other computers from causing disaster. The computer is the greatest tool of those who wish to implement processes because computers do exactly what they are told to do: nothing more, nothing less.

Computers are concrete examples of policy incarnate. They are the ultimate implements of control. A cybernetic world represents a world shorn of human power. This, of course, is the very world that the rationalists, the AI researchers, and the alignment alarmists all want. To them, humans can only be a source of error. Humans are chaotic and uncontrollable. They should be the cause of nuclear war: rational processes should be what prevents it.

What are we to make of this 1983 false alarm incident, then? Are we just lucky that Stanislav Petrov was a brilliant genius and a saint who single-handedly saved the human race? While he should be praised, I am not sure Petrov himself was that special. The key fact about Petrov was that he was a human being. He was not a computer–not an algorithm, and not a policy. He used his judgment to determine that the computer was likely in error. The launch detection system was new and known to be untrustworthy, so he thought it reasonable to assume that its detections were actually false alarms. Perhaps there was part of him too that, like Arkhipov in 1962, determined that the risks were too great to justify starting a nuclear war. Even when it seemed rational to do so, these men were guided by something essentially human that told them not to cause devastation on such a scale. As a recent Boston University paper argues, sycophantic AI systems can hardly be expected to show Petrov’s courage to disobey a policy from superiors.

If we want to formulate a robust, universally applicable policy for superweapons, I believe it should be this: Human beings form our best and only defense against the power of world-ending weapons. It is the human mind and the human spirit that alone can prevent disaster. It is more likely that attempts to subvert human control with rational algorithms and computer decision-making will be the ultimate cause of our destruction.

Why would we choose a policy that relies entirely on human beings, who cannot perfectly follow policies as a computer can?

First: for all the rapturous concern about perfect AGIs that are far more capable than humans, every single real computer system that has ever existed has contained bugs. There is something about the strict, formalized decision-making of a computer system that seems incapable of adapting properly to all the situations that the real world can throw at it. Stochastic AIs that avoid strict decision-making do no better: they often hallucinate completely untrue facts, and this hallucination may be unavoidable for an AI designed around statistical processing. Note the irony that stochastic AIs fail to provide the main advantage a computer holds over a human, which is the ability to flawlessly and endlessly follow a precise algorithm.

As an engineer with years of experience debugging computer systems, I find it strange to want to hand off decision-making to machines that have never once demonstrated true superiority over humans, and that continually require fine-tuning and development to prevent their bugs from causing disaster. This development process alone makes the idea of all-powerful machines daunting. One rule of safety-critical systems I have noticed is that the amount of human oversight in the development process goes up with the decision-making power of the computer. As cybernetic systems grow in control and complexity, there is an equal rise in systematized safety mechanisms that make the development system slower and more onerous. (The much-noted “slowness” of modern development in fields like infrastructure and health care likely comes from these two opposite forces working together.) Simply put: how much of an engineering and legal nightmare would it be for anyone to develop a superintelligence that we would trust with the fate of the world? Would it be worth it?

Even if we do manage to create a truly flawless superintelligence, though, its conclusions may still prove monstrous, or simply ridiculous. One favorite alignment thought experiment concerns an AI tasked with manufacturing paperclips. The AI decides to eliminate the human race in order to maximize the number of paperclips it can produce.

An icon of rationality

This example essentially resembles the earlier satire of mutually assured destruction in Dr. Strangelove. In that case the cause of the war was a rogue US general–human error. But the systems in the film that launched into action upon nuclear attack worked just as intended. In the film, the Soviet Union designed a doomsday device for nuclear deterrence that would automatically detonate cobalt bombs in the case of a nuclear strike. The ensuing nuclear fallout would render the entire Earth uninhabitable. The crucial element of this system is the automatic element: that is, the part controlled by a computer, beyond human power. The system does possess a logical flaw, which the rationalist at hand, Dr. Strangelove (based partially on John von Neumann), points out. The machine would only be an effective deterrent if the Americans knew about its existence. “Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?” The Soviet ambassador replies, “It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.”

But the truly committed rationalist is still not deterred (pun intended). After all, the catastrophe occurred because of unlikely interactions between the always-correct computer and human meddling. If we just get those humans out of the loop, then the computers would work perfectly.

That, of course, reveals the true cause of all this argument, all this development, all this talk of alignment. AI developers do not want to just replace human labor, but human power. AGI alignment as a technical challenge only makes sense within the context of humans handing over complete control to machines. The fear of superintelligence reveals their deep-seated self-hatred towards their own human intelligence.

The best humans are computers

Misanthropy runs deep in tech. Scientists have always been known to be awkward around people, more comfortable with things and theories. To a brain that prides itself on rationality, abstract thinking, and reason (and especially to a brain suffering from autism), human beings are infuriating, unexplainable, and chaotic. Many tech nerds (and I include myself among them) have generally poor experiences with other people. Some grew up alone or bullied. Some were raised by similarly cold parents, who passed on their distaste for human life to their children. Quite a few of them–possibly a majority of the men–have had traumatic romantic lives. (Read any Slate Star Codex article that deals with romance, and you will see what I mean.)

To them, the computer is a godsend. Here is something that realizes their dreams: an entity that is perfectly rational, controllable, and understandable. Even the vagaries of a black box AI like Chat-GPT is powered by the beautiful formalism of mathematics, not icky animal desires like the female preference for men with broad shoulders and social skills. Rationalists long eagerly for a world where the humans who ruined their lives can finally be sidelined. The nerds can be the Vikings now.

The AGI warnings are really subtle forms of bragging: a thinly veiled threat to the rest of us living our normal lives that one day, their kind will be in charge. They hope not for a bright future for the human race, but for a hierarchical world where the machines rule. The AI boosters wish to serve as their loyal collaborators, bullying the rest of us “irrational” humans as they once were bullied. Their main fear is that these future machine rulers will not favor them, and will mistake the pro-machine faction for the rest of the human chattel. They worry that they resemble humans more than machines, and that their overlords will not be able to tell the difference. Hence they must become cyborgs as quickly as possible: decision-making must be outsourced to Claude, sense-organs must be replaced with implants, and all personal data must be surrendered. They reason that physical and mental intermarriage with the machines will grant them some of their power, if not now then after the regime change.

The AGI doomsday debate is not about research or alignment but power. Power should never be given to machines. Human beings must remain at the center of decision-making. Like climate change, like wealth inequality, like all the other crises in the world today, AI alignment is a political question, not a technical one.

We should not fear future AGI, but those building these systems who want us to give up all our power to them.

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It's not just AI writing--it's bogged writing

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every day online, another writer is brutalized by bots. The AI writing is bad, but the rubes who admire it are worse. You slave away at the take factory all day, then see the top posts on Substack and realize you have been outcompeted by mass-produced prompts.

And the feedback is always appreciative. You read a highly recommended post that was clearly generated by a machine, and then read dozens of comments from (presumably real) people saying this was a “thought-provoking piece”, often with the same AI cadence. Horrible. Worst of all is when you yourself are fooled, as prominent culture writer Ted Gioia showed when he learned that one of his “top articles of 2025” was AI-generated.

But that situation is rarer. Most of the AI writing is far more mindless and far more brazen. It provokes the same indignant despondency in the human writer that most graduate students feel on Friday nights. Is everyone else crazy? It’s not real writing! Can’t people tell it’s fake? What point is there to work on making your own writing not AI-generated if people can’t even tell the difference? But you can tell the difference.

Maybe the AI has progressed so far that only a seasoned wordcel can distinguish them. But this makes an assumption: people do prefer human writing, but cannot tell the difference between writing made by humans and writing made by AI. The problem is one of ignorance. This is always amenable to the liberal worldview, for the ignorant can be educated, and then they will think exactly like you.

That assumption is key to the writer’s own worldview: that people prefer human writing. Obviously writers prefer human writing. And most everyone who has practiced an art, and in this way seen the painstaking but rewarding process of creatively crafting something for others to enjoy, prefers human writing too.

This is not the case for most people. Plenty of people really do prefer the artificial.

Surely you can see your own face

There is an adjective from the Internet that doesn’t have an equivalent in polite society: bogged. It comes from the Bogdanoff twins, who appear at the top of this article. The twins worked in French TV, presenting science programmes, and lived a fairly colorful life together before unfortunately dying one week apart in late 2021 and early 2022. Despite denying ever undergoing surgery, the two sprinted past “tasteful work”, right through “weird-looking” and into “alien cat creature.” Hence the Internet using them as the name for when someone undergoes so much work that they start to look obviously strange and inhuman.

The Bogdanoffs claimed they were part of a secret experiment with “protocols”

When I told my girlfriend about this term, she thought I said “botched” instead of “bogged.” This reflects our normal understanding of what happens when people get this much work. It must be botched work: a mistake, the result of either an untalented doctor or a delusional patient who cannot tell that they look odd.

Yet huge numbers of wealthy, famous people are now bogged. Actresses like Nicole Kidman, Emma Stone, and Julianne Moore now resemble slightly melted wax sculptures patterned after themselves 20 years ago. One must wonder if they know how strange they look. They have teams of consultants and sycophants whispering “You look great sweetie” into their ear every day, of course, but no one can prevent you from seeing your own fleshy face in the mirror when you wake up after an all-night poppers session.

Yet they persist. The tasteless and the tasteful alike, the tacky and the artsy, the C-listers and the Oscar winners: all have sunken into the Bog.

It is not only the patients themselves who tolerate the bogged look. One of the wealthiest men in the world, Jeff Bezos, left his natural-looking wife for Lauren Sanchez. Sanchez had already boarded the Bogged Express before she got with Bezos, but she now looks like the Picture of Dorian Grey given sentience.

I can’t really criticize him, though. Compared to other billionaire couples (invariably dour or divorced), the two seem genuinely happy. Not only does Sanchez seem to like the bogged look, but if anything Bezos himself seems to prefer it. The filler, the Botox, the contours: they light his fire.

Surrender to the Bog: it will set you free

Blaming all this on a collective delusion seems hard to believe. Say what you will about Bezos, but he is not delusional. He moves with a sharklike sense of reality. It is clear-eyed, unsentimental, and aware of the location of his prey. The billionaire shark chose the bogged face, and it did so enthusiastically. Why?

The better explanation seems to be that everyone knows they are bogged, but that they prefer it that way.

Picture yourself as a wealthy woman who stars on a Real Housewives of ___ show. In your daily routine of spas, brunches, and gossip sessions, you will not see many “natural beauties.” Your friends will all sport new faces every few months. Some might coyly hint at what procedure they bought without spelling it out exactly, but your real friends will tell you exactly which surgeon gave them this fantastic set of lips. After all, they think you deserve the very best work. The best work does not mean the “most natural” work, by the way. Your friends want you to look good, and the good-looking people they see every day are all bogged.

Real Housewives, before and after Bogging

Your friends are the people who you trust and respect, who let you know what is chic and what is out, who you see every day and who start to look far more normal than the natural 19-year-old serving you mimosas on Sundays. Who do you want to resemble, if not the people you call your friends?

Being bogged, at this point, is a status symbol. The more that wealthy and powerful people (largely women at this point, but men are getting work done more and more) assimilate the bogged look, the more it becomes the new standard for beauty. The artificiality is the point. Being “natty”, as the boys say, grants you only moral stature, which can be appropriated anyway by appearing to be natty.

Nothing new in terms of beauty standards. Banal as it is to say that “fashion changes”, history shows us that virtually no “timeless” facet of beauty remains fixed through time. The women of the Tokugawa shogunate who shaved their eyebrows and blackened their teeth were considered very attractive.

Beauty circa 1650 Edo

So it is with AI writing. Artists and writers may prefer natty writing. But there are many more tech people, and the tech people have much more money, so their opinion will win out in any market and any large platform. And the tech people, like Bezos, want their writing bogged.

Bogged down in Truth

I do not have a lot of writer friends. I have a few artist friends, who unanimously disparage AI writing. But I am an engineer in San Francisco, so I have many, many tech friends. And when I talk about writing, they always ask me if I use AI to write. The excitement in their eyes is clear. I am reminded of high school, when we would gleefully but shyly ask our friends after a party if they, you know, did it last night.

I have learned not to speak too negatively of AI writing in these situations. It is a bummer to them. It would be like criticizing someone’s nosejob right in front of them.

If I start lecturing about how AI churns monotonous, mediocre prose, or say that it disagrees with my most insightful points and wants to cover it up with inane cliches, if I rant about how AI writing covers up meaning with pointless quantity in a vivid illustration of a society hyperfocused on production at any cost, then I provoke instant backlash. I have outed myself as backwards, biased, artsy, and probably egotistical.

These are all reasons that many people prefer bogged writing: it is objective, clear, and new.

To the many fans of AI writing, the tics that so many of us bemoan–the em-dashes, the bullet points, the emojis and bolding, the lists, saying “it’s not that, it’s this”--all of this signals something good about what they are about to read. They believe it signals writing that will be objective, clear, and free of messy agendas, human fixations, and obscure foibles. Bogged writing is uncomplicated and predictable.

These kinds of people tend to value writing as a medium for clearly communicating information. Writing which Expresses Your Individuality seems obscurantist to them. Writing which takes risks and avoids cliches seems fussy. Writing which seeks to dazzle or amuse or impress strikes these readers as pretentious, as artsy.

Not everyone has read the last 50 years of deconstructionist critique regarding discourse, the construction of social norms, and the relativism of truth. Many people do still think there is some Truth out there, independent of what you say or how you say it, and the best way to say something is to convey that truth as clearly as possible. To the objective truth-believer, AI writing not only beats humans on clearly communicating the truth, but also inherently knows the truth.

To them, AI speaks with the voice of God. They trust AI chatbots as the ultimate, disinterested voice of reason and truth. Googling a fact used to be the arbiter of truth, but even on Google you had to choose your biased results. Articles you see on Google might still show some person’s name or face, a reminder that different people may produce different answers.

AI, though, just tells you “the answer.” Even though people know that it hallucinates, even though tech-savvy people know that the answer to every query is different, they still believe that it produces an answer statistically superior to anything an individual person might know. It pools human knowledge in the manner of a prestigious encyclopedia, and so its answers ring with authority.

I once stumbled into a lunchtime discussion with a coworker about communism. (Not a smart move from me, but all I said was that “the family resembles primitive communism”, and that started it.) Sitting outside at a table, our talk went around and around in rhetorical circles, as it usually does in political debates. After we finished debating it in-person, my coworker came back and proudly showed me his Chat-GPT results.

He had asked the chatbot why it was that communism could never work. Chat-GPT had helpfully confirmed his suspicions about communism. He was right, the AI said, and very smart too. Of course I immediately pulled up Chat-GPT and asked it to confirm my opinion. It happily did this, and by showing that result to my coworker I managed to smooth over the whole discussion. We laughed it off.

Comrade GPT proved me right in the end

But his appeal to Chat-GPT had clearly taken the form of an appeal to a higher authority. Chat-GPT, to him, is the teacher, the parent, the one who settles disputes with honest Truth.

Not only that: Chat-GPT is new. AI is the future. People often prefer the future over the moldy old past. The “craft” trends we have seen in areas such as clothing and food are trends that developed decades after mass-produced products completely displaced homemade ones. In the 1950s, the same TV dinners we disparage today were seen as futuristic and high-status. People much preferred packaged food over the homemade meals they associated with poverty and the Depression. Similarly, tailors were immediately displaced by mass-produced clothes, and it would be many years before people stopped viewing factory-made clothes as superior to those made by human craftsmen.

A delicious TV dinner

Artists may tell themselves they are different. But most people view arts as a form of crafts–as most craftsmen themselves believed before the Industrial Revolution. If clothing and food can be replaced by superior machine-made versions, then writing can too.

The point is this: people are not fooled by these AI-written articles. They know they are AI-written, and they prefer it that way.

I think a sort of soothing substitution enters the brain upon reading bogged writing, similar to the mental trick that happens when you eat some obviously artificial and unhealthy Flaming Hot Cheetos Burrito. You don’t deny that it is artificial and unhealthy, but further reasoning gets shut down. The brain suppresses all information that might impede your pleasure: the Modern Marvels episodes where you saw vats of sludge being formed by whirring machines into hardened goo that is then packaged in plastic bags, the obese customers you see loading bags of these Flaming Hot Cheetos into their Walmart shopping carts who clearly represent your future, knowledge of your own mortality. Thoughts do not coexist with snacks. We call it slop, after all, because it makes you happy. Happy as a pig in shit.

Dialectics of writing, or: When Fashion Leaves the Bog

We should expect to see a cyclical trend in writing and arts similar to the introduction of other technologies. Right now, bogged writing is enjoying rapid growth that crowds out the competition. This will continue for some period until stabilizing at a high level, which will be the nadir of human-made art. Nadirs can be very disruptive to industries and workers. Before the craft beer movement, the American beer industry bottomed out in 1970 at just 89 breweries in the entire United States. No way of predicting how bad it could get for writers, but we have not yet hit this bottom point.

After that, a countercultural movement for natty writing will grow, establishing a healthy niche in the market that nonetheless pales in comparison to the pre-AI writing days. The few writers who survived the lean years will find themselves in fashion again.

Eventually some people stopped snarfing down microwave meals. Eventually businesses grew that sold healthy food, natural food, mimicking pre-industrial norms for a much higher price. I wonder if some clever surgeon sells a luxury “natural” treatment that will take a bogged face and return it to a state of Edenic beauty. That treatment, though, will cost far more than routine Botox.

Writing, too, can become boutique. But writing has been replaced by a mass-produced competitor so quickly because, unlike food, it already is boutique.

We already believe that we must choose between food that is either healthy, natural, expensive, and snooty on the one hand or food that is unhealthy, artificial, cheap, and delicious on the other. This belief is even more entrenched in art. You can either devote yourself to Good Art, which is pretentious, unpopular, difficult to understand, and vaguely edifying, or you can give in and enjoy the Bad Art, which is friendly, approachable, easy to understand, popular, and bad for you. The first form of art cannot really be replaced with AI, but it has become culturally and commercially marginalized.

The second form of art can easily be replaced because people never cared about the artists making it in the first place. Advertising slogans, Lifetime movies, reality TV, TikTok videos: we were already paddling in an overwhelming deluge of low-effort “content” before AI expanded the endless ocean. The difference between pre-AI slop and post-AI slop is like the difference between a Cheeto made from corn products and a hypothetical Cheeto grown from inorganic matter. The artificial already dominated the natural, even if the art was being made by human hands.

Unfortunately for the writers, the truth is that most people preferred bogged writing all along.

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The Napoleonic guide to youthful achievement

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The original boy wonder

Every historical personality can be analyzed as either history or as a personality. Most of us don’t read biographies because of an interest in history. We mostly want a good story, something applicable to our own lives, maybe something inspiring. Underneath all the dates and battles and place names the past is made of human beings, the lives they lived, and the choices they made.

As a historical figure, Napoleon was big. Monumental. He won wars, redrew borders, imposed law codes. He captured the imagination of the 19th century by embodying the new, exciting trends of the era–dynamism, meritocracy, modernity.

Two hundred years on, with plenty of distance between his time and now, we keep returning to Napoleon not for the accomplishments but for the story. His rise resembles a self-insert power fantasy at times, a parabolic arc upward sweeping an unknown Corsican from lieutenant to First Consul in a few years. Most of all, what strikes me about his story is his youth.

Napoleon’s youth forms as much of his mythos as the hat or the hand-in-jacket pose. The predominant image of the pudgy-faced, 40-year old emperor, facing off against Wellington in his last stand at Waterloo, undercuts the boy wonder aspect of Napoleon slightly. (Another complaint we all have with Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: casting the craggy-faced, 49-year-old Joaquin Phoenix to play the Emperor.) To repeat the resume a bit: brigadier general at 25, commander of an army at 26, dictator of France a few months after turning 30.

Bonaparte at 35: English propaganda vs French propaganda

Napoleon also seemed young, an all-powerful boy playing games with the Old World. In a continent of stuffy aristocrats and ancient monarchies, where young men powdered their hair white to look older, Bonaparte erupted onto the scene as an energetic dynamo with long, black, natural hair. As a general, he was aggressive and fast-moving; as a ruler, he was a workaholic, a micromanager, and an Enlightenment man, thoroughly dedicated to removing outdated, “irrational” aspects of the old order. For all his conservatism, for all the moments he “betrayed the Revolution,” he never stopped capturing the imagination of reformers and visionaries.

In our youth-obsessed time, the facts of Napoleon’s youth appear all the more striking. Napoleon was the spiritual ancestor of the wunderkind movie directors and college-dropout startup founders: he would win every 30 Under 30 contest, if they existed in the 19th century. Napoleon actively cultivated an image of energy and restlessness that presaged the startup cult of modern Silicon Valley. Like Zuckerberg and his gray T-shirts, Bonaparte often eschewed the garb of royalty and stuck to the relatively plain outfit of a colonel. Like the founder who posts LinkedIn stories of 18-hour work days, Napoleon encouraged the idea that he never slept, that he stayed up late at his desk, that his orders could come at any time of the night.

As with any young achiever, the story of the boy Bonaparte can fill you with inspiration, envy, or dread. That last reaction may be the most common one. Our culture has only grown more youth-obsessed, even as the young themselves have grown more despairing. Sparkling images of 20-somethings living perfect lives of adventure, beauty, and achievement coexist side by side on our phones with daily accounts of youthful despair and self-flagellation. “I’ve done nothing with my life. I’ll never achieve anything.” So you might read a biography of Napoleon and wallow in discontentment. Go ahead, post it: “it’s so over. I’m 30 and can’t pass a job interview; at my age Napoleon was running France.”

Youth unemployment skyrockets in America and companies refuse to hire entry-level workers, even as anxious teenaged strivers hear ever more stories of college dropout billionaires and celebrities making it big before they can legally drink. The shape of a society fashions the shape of a typical life, and we do not seem to understand how a life should be shaped.

These questions used to torment me too: am I doing enough, quickly enough? As the years pass, where should I end up? For this reason I love age-related outliers: not only the wunderkinds like Mozart, Terence Tao, and John Stuart Mill, but the late bloomers too--Raymond Chandler publishing his first short story at 45, Michael Haneke directing his first film at 47, Colonel Sanders starting KFC in his 60s. These people upend the understanding of the proper shape of a life.

And there is no better case study than Napoleon, the original wunderkind, the striver of the century.

Your life is your own, but your environment is not. There is an ecology of greatness: a collection of conditions that make the strange facts of Napoleon’s life possible. The main condition determining the age of great accomplishment is that central social feature that my Substack underlines, the key characteristic of our ancient future: stability.

The revolution is here: you are now promoted

Before the Revolution the French military was, like the other armies of Europe, run by old aristocrats. Young ambitious officers would have to wait their turn for decades behind ancient dukes and counts. Commoners were obviously excluded from achieving high rank. These ancient aristocrats would hold onto outdated theories from their youth. Throughout the late 1700s, outsiders like Guibert, Gribeauval, and Bourcet proposed innovative new reforms and theories to modernize the French military. The young Napoleon devoured these works in his youth, but the aristocratic officer corps of the Ancien Regime, content to treat warfare as a gentlemanly contest, resolutely resisted the ideas of the young bookworms.

Then the Revolution came: the old officer corps either fled the country, were killed in combat, or were denounced for incompetence or treachery and executed under the guillotine. Suddenly the army was wide open: a new generation was allowed to enter the ranks all at once. Historian Eric Hobsbawm notes, “In 1806 out of 142 generals in the mighty Prussian army, seventy-nine were over sixty years of age, as were a quarter of all regimental commanders. But in 1806 Napoleon (who had been a general at the age of twenty-four), Murat (who had commanded a brigade at twenty-six), Ney (who did so at twenty-seven) and Davout, were all between twenty-six and thirty-seven years old.” This extreme youth among the Revolutionary French officer corps remains historically unusual: the average age of a brigadier general in the modern, “meritocratic” American military is closer to 50. The US military may indeed be, as its supporters claim, the most fearsome fighting force in world history, but it has also achieved a remarkable amount of stability.

When a system is stable, big hierarchies form over time, and the queue to any position of power starts to snake around the block. The old hold on longer, and the young have to wait longer and longer for their turn. Institutional knowledge builds up, and the period of training that someone must go through before being ready to contribute stretches out. New ideas become less useful than experience. The premodern and postmodern worlds feature a great number of stable–that is, unchanging–institutions. When systems start going through rapid changes, on the other hand, experience and institutional knowledge become active liabilities. The old become worse than useless; they are active impediments to the new ideas of the young.

Napoleon’s first victim, Johann Peter Beaulieu, was 44 years his senior

The Austrian military, Napoleon’s most consistent opponent, displays the cycle of innovation clearly. In the beginning of his career, Bonaparte faced a succession of old men. In his first campaign, the 26-year-old general defeated Austrian opponents like the 71-year-old Beaulieu and the 72-year-old Wurmser. Even after General and then First Consul Bonaparte repeatedly trounced these doddering old generals in the Wars of the First and Second Coalition, the Habsburg establishment resisted the reforms of the Austrian emperor’s younger brother, Archduke Charles. Not until the epochal defeat at Austerlitz would the old men of Austria finally allow the 34-year-old Charles to introduce new techniques to the army.

In those days, at the dawn of modernity, the divide was clear: the Habsburgs were old, and the French were young. The monarchies were ancient, and the Revolution was new. Some societies crystallize at all levels over time, while others drink the cocktail of instability and shake up everything at once.

Usually things do not change so starkly. Most societies contain stable and unstable fields at any given time. Fields grow and change over history; at any given time some may be unstable and good for youthful accomplishment, while others are static.

Physics, for instance, was a bit of an old man’s field at the end of the 19th century. The great secrets of the universe were seen as largely solved. Albert Michelson said in 1894, “it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established…an eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” And these grand old men held on tightly to their old concepts, causing Max Planck to famously remark that “science progresses one funeral at a time.”

Paul Dirac (second from right) winning the Nobel Prize at 31, when most physicists are still in grad school

But the quantum revolution Planck ushered in suddenly swept away the old physics, and a new generation of physicists achieved extraordinary things at young ages. Einstein had his Annus Mirabilis at 26 and won the Nobel Prize at 42; Niels Bohr won his Nobel at 37; Paul Dirac won his at 31. Werner Heisenberg, the youngest of the golden generation, published a major paper at 24 and won the Nobel Prize at 31. Dirac summed up that era of physics by saying “it was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since. It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work.”

The halcyon days did not last long. Physics has returned to the status quo of the late 19th century now, focused on renovation over revolution. Today the average Nobel laureate is in their 60s. Most physics programs do not even start teaching students about contemporary physics concepts until their mid-20s: 24-year-olds today spend their time learning about the century-old quantum mechanics that the 24-year-old Heisenberg invented. Most graduate students do not start truly contributing to meaningful research until their late 20s. I recall one professor in a materials science course in college grousing that “if I was working in the 1800s I wouldn’t have to do anything to get a law named after me. It was so easy then.” Sour grapes, maybe, but not inaccurate.

Physics has now regressed back to the domain of the old. So has politics. It was big news when the “young” Kamala Harris, aged 60, became nominee for president, considering the 2024 election was formerly being contested by an 81-year-old and a 78-year-old man. While the average age of Congress dipped in the 1970s as the baby boomers entered office, it has steadily risen since 1980. The 119th Congress is the third oldest since 1789–the very same year as the French Revolution.

Tech, meanwhile, went through a golden era for youth from the 1990s to the 2010s, when new business ideas could be launched as websites or phone apps. The cofounders of Google developed the key algorithm powering the search engine during graduate school. Mark Zuckerberg was famously even younger when he created Facebook, making it briefly cool to drop out of college and launch a startup. I vividly remember the San Francisco of the early 2010s, the time when 20-year-olds migrated by the thousands to create apps, Peter Thiel was paying people to drop out of college, and the hoodie became a bonafide fashion statement. But now tech seems to be swinging back to favor slightly older people. The key figures at OpenAI, for instance, are mostly in their late 30s, not bright-eyed kids out of college. The dark art of developing and training high-performance AI models requires more education and experience than “learning to code” an iPhone app did. Companies like Meta offer multimillion-dollar hiring packages to 35-year-old researchers with doctorates from top labs now. They don’t pursue 22-year-old whiz-kid programmers.

The peak of Silicon Valley dropout culture

Boom and bust, up and down: every field goes through its cycles. Plenty of ink has been spilled describing cycles of change and stability in institutions–Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, Kondratiev waves. But I am not a management consultant. I am not a startup huckster. I am interested in what it feels like to live within these institutions, to build your life within vast cycles and trends and historical movements without losing sight of your own agency and power.

Too often we ignore these secular trends and create a fantasy of meritocracy, ascribing achievement and burnout strictly to the individual. On the other hand, an understanding of institutions also leads to the dark road of passivity, to a belief that societal structures somehow determine a life. The questions remain: am I doing enough, quickly enough? As the years pass, where should I end up?

The schizophrenia of youthful expectations

In theory, any ambitious young person entering a field should gain a sense of the average timeline expected of them. The average cadet graduating from West Point, for instance, does not expect to equal Napoleon and become a brigadier general at 26. The average athlete knows that they should not wait until the age of 17 to choose a sport. So long as the rules are well-understood and, yes, stable, then people hold a realistic model of their field and the expected shape of their lives.

This is absolutely not the case for most high-status industries right now. The average young striver is receiving terribly mixed signals about their expected trajectory. Until quite recently, the media consistently pumped the story that our world is changing so much that our time has a unique, dire need for young talent. A common complaint I have heard from older hiring managers and executives in San Francisco is that entry-level workers hold warped expectations: they want immediate promotions, they imagine themselves as entrepreneurs, they don’t defer enough to their elders. But who tells them to expect these things other than their elders?

The cult of youth achievement was invented, as they say, to sell nylons. It functions as a way to flatter young people, even though it ultimately makes them horribly insecure. This idea has been circulating ever since youth culture really took off among the Baby Boomers–they wanted to think that they should be in charge, and they spent so much money that advertisers and cultural figures were happy to tell them how smart the young really are.

But the slow creep of postmodern decay has changed the mood among young people and the media that pander to them. In the present, AI is ravaging education; in the future, employers eagerly await the prospect of replacing their workers. The exclusionary AI boom itself has narrowed avenues for youthful achievement, even as the images of all-conquering twenty-somethings continue unabated. The ever-increasing educational demands placed on new generations–where college degrees are required for jobs that used to only need high school diplomas, and where doctorates have bloated in average duration–feel perverse in light of slowing entry-level employment rates. How can any young person be expected to contribute great new ideas when they stay in school until their early 30s, and then can’t find a job once they graduate?

The old have decided they have no more use for the young.

This is a return to the past, a feature of our time becoming an ancient future. Rule by elders, after all, forms the single most historically common form of premodern government. There is technically nothing wrong with a stable society that values experience over youthful dynamism. These governments, though, also came from cultures that recognized their own stability, planned assiduously for the future, and explicitly valued wisdom and caution. The credit-addled, short-sighted cultures of the West, ruled by Botoxed sexagenarians who post AI slop on Twitter, share none of the elderly good sense of these cultures of the past.

Ironically, the old and powerful now exhibit the most short-term thinking. If employers value experience now, then why do they also abandon mentorship? If young people must wait in line for years to assume positions of power, then why are they laid off and cut loose from organizations at every turn?

As the old abdicate their responsibility in favor of the easy thrills of the cruise and the golf trip, an ideological collision traps the minds of young people like a body caught between crashing cars. All the aspirations of the past clamor and compete for space in the mind of the young. The aging hippies declare that every 20-something should “enjoy their youth” and “follow their passion.” Their corporate overlords and grindset propagandists push them to strive, to achieve, to hustle and build that business. Online, passive communities form in response, and advise the anxious youth to give up, to lie flat, to self-diagnose with chronic illnesses and psychosomatic conditions. And even in 2025, under all the noise, thrums the steady song of tradition, the call of a family and children and the quiet life of love. What shape should life take now?

In Napoleon’s time, the shape of a life seemed determined by hierarchy, tradition, and age. One of his great achievements was to introduce the ingredients of will and talent to dissolve that predetermined shape. Two hundred years on, any consensus on the shape of a life feels muddled. The only thing that can be sure is that you are not doing it right, not doing it quickly, and not doing enough.

This insecurity, this myth of constant acceleration, this intentionally stoked fear of missing out on everything–these belie the secure, stable systems being reformed by the powerful. But there is always some place where the sun still shines, where the Revolution lives, where the young outrank the old. If you find yourself in those fields, then embrace the chaos and acceleration. The rest of us must tune out the media narratives and fashion a life with our own shape. In any case, you can only judge that life once it is over. All the checkpoints along the way don’t mean a thing.

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Napoleon and the missing Great Men

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking a lot about Napoleon. Sometimes it feels lonely.

Bonaparte is not an esoteric topic. Pretty much everyone knows the very broad strokes of his life–great victories, lost to the Russian winter, defeated at Waterloo. Short, bicorne hat, ABBA song. That he remains well-known as a collection of dead symbols does not mean that he has not seen a very real decline as a living subject of public discourse and debate.

I have been listening for some time now to the excellent podcast “Age of Napoleon.” The creator accurately describes it as the “largest popular history” of Napoleon available now. I have reached episode 120 of the series, spending the equivalent of multiple days listening to someone narrate the history of the Emperor and his times. There is nothing quite like falling down a historical rabbit hole, and few rabbit holes are as deep as Napoleon and the French Revolution. Learning the details of his life gives me a similar feeling that young people felt upon watching The Last Dance in 2020. You’ve heard of the legend of Michael Jordan, but to see it all presented in staggering detail makes you think: “He really was that guy.” But it also made me look around and ask: are we talking about Napoleon enough?

Ridley Scott made a crappy movie about him, which introduced a whole generation to Napoleon’s marital problems. But even presenting Bonaparte as L’empereur des cucks didn’t wedge him back into the zeitgeist, or make him more relatable to the sexually frustrated youth. I admit it may be unreasonable to expect people to spend all day talking about a man who died (was poisoned) 200 years ago. A great deal has happened since Waterloo: other people deserve to get their own pastries named after them.

But this is not some anonymous, mutton-chopped 19th-century American president. No shame in forgetting Chester Arthur, but this is Napoleon. We should all be a little obsessed with the man. His aura used to extend beyond military nerds and history enthusiasts. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the 19th century, Napoleon was basically the main character of history. He was the center of attention for 100 years–the subject of every historical anecdote, a supporting actor in every intellectual debate, a literal character in numerous books and movies. Today Godwin’s Law states that every debate ends up with some comparison to the Nazis; a century ago, every debate climaxed with a comparison to the French Revolution and Napoleon.

The characteristic figures of an age always embody the characteristic ideas of the age. Napoleon dominated thought because he embodied a great historiographical debate of his time: the influence of Great Men in history. The decline in relative interest in Napoleon tracks with a waning of interest in these influential figures.

We don’t talk about Napoleon because we don’t argue about Great Men.

Main character syndrome

In 1794, the 25-year-old Corsican Napoleone Buonaparte was arrested and thrown in jail for 2 weeks. After his release, he took part in a failed expedition to free his home island of Corsica from the British. He also found time to write a crappy novella depicting his failed relationship with Desiree Clary, whose sister had married Napoleon’s older brother. In the novella, Clisson et Eugenie, the Napoleon stand-in Clisson watches helplessly from the hospital as another soldier seduces his lover, Eugenie. The story was not published. (Ridley Scott did have a point in fixating on Napoleon’s cuck side.)

Boyish, weak chin, unattractive haircut: 6.5/10

1795 did not begin auspiciously for him either. Napoleon refused to report to his post in the backwards Vendee region: he considered this an undesirable career dead-end. For his disobedience he was removed from the list of active generals. His career seemingly stillborn, he considered transferring to Constantinople to serve the Ottoman sultan. While Bonaparte had already become a “brigadier general”, in the fledgling military of revolutionary France this was about as impressive as calling yourself the “VP of Marketing” in a 5-person startup. The 25-year-old Napoleon: minor noble, seething indie writer, overproduced elite, superfluous man.

Ten years after his arrest, he would crown himself Emperor of the French. He was already seen as the man of the century.

From the beginning of his rise, Napoleon captivated observers with a mix of traits that can only be called “modern.” He was young, energetic, and highly effective. He sought to consolidate the shaky legacy of the French Revolution, the most epochal event Europe had ever seen. He mastered the nation-state and cultivated the attention of artists and philosophers. Hegel, seeing him in the flesh, famously called him “the world-soul,” mastering the world from atop his horse. Beethoven planned to dedicate his Third “Heroic” Symphony to Bonaparte–until Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, which shattered the composer’s illusions about liberty and equality. As artists and intellectuals praised him, conservatives called him Anti-Christ. He was modernity as a man.

Bonaparte embodied many of the prevailing ideas of the 19th century–dynamism, progress, individualism, meritocracy, revolution. He was arguably the first self-made man in the collective imagination of Europeans, a continent composed of aristocrats and commoners. (Benjamin Franklin probably was the first self-made man in America, but with respect to Ben, he never defeated Austria and Russia in a single battle.) To a civilization accustomed to believing that the events of history were reflections of God’s will, or the decisions of those chosen by God to rule, he showed that a single, decisive personality could seemingly bend the fate of nations to his will.

With the decline of religious history, people invented new gods to steer the course of nations. If history was no longer moved by the will of God, then secular historians of this time focused on biographies of Great Men, the movers and shakers whose wills determined the course of history. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian, originated the theory in 1840 with his lectures on (what else) the French Revolution: “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” The Napoleonic legend now had a corresponding intellectual myth.

The 19th century, the era of modernity, became obsessed with Great Men in all kinds of domains: titanic figures who would lead progress through vast personal projects. Wagner tried to do this for music, Hegel for philosophy. Darwin was the Great Man of biology. Nations tried to find their own heroes to canonize as Great Men: Washington in the US, Hidalgo in Mexico, Bolivar and San Martin in South America, Garibaldi and Mazzini in Italy. Every 19th-century nationalist needed a Father of the Nation, and the original nation-state, France, had the most distinguished and controversial Father of them all.

The individualistic, self-confident, and rising bourgeoisie devoured biographies of Great Men, worshipping achievement in the way their forefathers worshipped saints. Some welded it to emerging theories of Social Darwinism, viewing human society as a self-regulating state of nature where the fittest survived. Great Men, especially the robber barons of business–Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt–prowled the economic jungle as apex predators. Francis Galton wrote the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. From there he founded the infamous field of eugenics. The 19th century, obsessed with achievement and greatness, placed Napoleon at the head of its pantheon.

Napoleon in the Soviet adaptation of War and Peace (1967)

Plenty of 19th-century thinkers, of course, attacked the Great Man theory in general and Napoleon in particular. France’s great foe, Russia, took an especially dim view of the Emperor. I find it fascinating that two of the greatest works of the two greatest Russian writers--Tolstoy and Dostoevsky--essentially take on the Great Man theory as their major theme. Dostoevsky parodies this thinking in Crime and Punishment, with his antihero Raskolnikov explicitly patterning himself off Napoleon. His fellow Russian Leo Tolstoy went even further, featuring Napoleon himself as a (singularly unimpressive) character in War and Peace. Tolstoy uses the novel as a 1000-page assault on the concept of the Great Man. To do this he analyzes Napoleon as a “slave of history,” depicting him personally as vain, emotional, and out-of-touch with reality. Tolstoy then devotes the second epilogue of the novel to a 50-page essay on “the difficulty of defining the forces that move nations.” The so-called “forces” he attacks? The “heroes endowed with extraordinary, superhuman capacities…who lead the masses.” That is: Great Men.

The debate raged throughout the century. I once found, in an antique store in Pacifica, an original collection of Harper’s Magazines from the year 1858, compiled in a single, leatherbound volume. I found it fascinating to flip through random articles from 150 years ago to see what writers were discussing on an average month. No surprise that the magazine serialized, each month, a biography of Napoleon.

The great question of the 19th century, though, would be apparently settled in the 20th century.

The end of the Great Man

The 20th century saw an all-out intellectual war on the concept of Great Men. Ironically, the most individualistic time in history also saw the role of individuals within history effectively dismantled. Fawning biographies of popular heroes, while still selling well, were replaced with scientific analyses of the broad trends that moved nations. Most came to agree with Tolstoy that “so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.” The left and right supplied new trend-based theories of history to replace the old myths.

The theories of history with the most academic adherents today are Marxist or critical. Marxist historians focus on historical materialism: the theory of history as a struggle for economic supremacy between different classes. The French Revolution was once widely understood as a revolution of the rising bourgeoisie against the old feudal aristocracy. Napoleon, then, matters less than the economic forces he unleashed in France. While this theory has declined in significance since its peak in the 1960s, many historians still subscribe to some version of this.

More popular now is critical theory, especially applied as postcolonial or critical race theory. Class struggle still features heavily, but as just one arena of broader power struggles between oppressor and oppressed. Foucault and other postmodern philosophers emphasized how knowledge, language, and other mental processes reflect contemporary power structures. Not only actions but even thoughts are thus the result of great trends. What hope do individuals have when “there is a policeman inside all our heads?”

Critical race theory, by far the most popular historical theory in academia today, adds a heavy emphasis on racial conflict and European colonialism as the determining forces of history. The colonialist historian substitutes racial struggle for class struggle: Europeans become the eternal bourgeoisie of the world. Napoleon may be analyzed as a colonialist, sending a failed expedition to re-enslave Haiti. He may be criticized for his famous Orientalism: he tried and failed to conquer Egypt, and kept a Moorish servant around him for the rest of his reign. Napoleon’s distinctive characteristics recede into the background in the face of his simple demographic facts: dead white man.

The shadow cousin of critical race history is white supremacist history, which has little academic relevance but huge popular relevance as the ideology of the online right. Like the critical race historians, it focuses on racial struggle as an animating force. The perspective is merely reversed: the white supremacist historian celebrates the oppressor instead of championing the oppressed. Some games may be played to disguise the true oppressor: contemporary Europeans may be cast as hapless victims of a Third World or Islamist invasion, itself a historical legacy of some Clash of Civilizations. More hardline right-wingers support fascist-style race essentialism; softer conservatives use terms like “Western culture” or “Christian civilization” to say the same thing. As with critical theory, Napoleon’s distinctiveness is suppressed in favor of a generic celebration of a powerful European general and monarch. Right-wingers do not engage well with the specifics of history; anything which complicates the analysis (such as Bonaparte’s famous romantic difficulties) gets tossed out.

In every case, the romantic role of individuals yields to the mechanical forces of history: class, race, nation-states.

But philosophical questions are never settled; they simply become uninteresting or uncomfortable. I suspect the traumas of the 20th century played a greater role than simple intellectual superiority in elevating these theories. The sophisticated public and intellectual establishment became uneasy with the idea of Great Men running the show. Like the toothbrush mustache and the name “Adolf”, Great Man theory was forever tainted by Hitler. After all, you could plausibly argue that the most significant individual of the 20th century was Hitler–although Time magazine graciously gave the honors of “Person of the Century” to Einstein. Now, stories driven by the villain may make good prestige TV, but they make for disturbing history. If the story of the 20th century was a story driven by Hitler, then we would rather pretend there is no story at all. No story, no antagonist–or protagonist. So no Great Men either.

One place alone has not abandoned Great Man theory: Silicon Valley. The last holdout of modernism, this product of mid-century American Big Science retains a healthy glow for the heroic, individualistic entrepreneur. With its captive and fawning media, monopoly-driven ecosystem, worship of robber barons, and general lack of regulation, Silicon Valley resembles the capitalist economy of the 19th century more than the 20th. Like the online right, most of its intellectuals operate on the margins of mainstream thought, as Twitter personalities or marginalized writers. Ayn Rand, a favorite of technolibertarians, created a laughable economic philosophy based on extreme individualism and untrammeled will. Her books seemed to posit that Great Men run corporations now, and the Napoleons of the modern world are designing railroads with their big, sexy brains. (Come to think of it, Rand probably put the final nail in the coffin of the Great Man theory among serious academic circles.)

An aspiring Bonaparte of our time

Just talking about Napoleon in positive terms at all gives off a kind of right-wing aura. From Napoleon’s time to Hitler’s, political figures turned from leaders into charlatans. The historians of the 19th century debated how Napoleon was able to accomplish so much; the historians of the 20th century debated how the German people were seduced into following such an obviously lacking figure as Hitler. This narrative of questioning how ordinary people might be “seduced” to follow a strongman persists today in any discussion of unsavory politicians: Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump. The provincial followers of these conservative leaders keep alive the folk history of hero worship–mass rallies, flag-waving, propagandistic art–tainting discussions of greatness even further. Greatness has been abandoned to startups, and the right wing.

It shouldn’t be. From an individual level, greatness remains a very real and moving aspiration. Regardless of whether great people truly “move history”, all of us exist as individuals swimming within the current of history. The ambition to be great may come from self-serving origins.

But I believe it should be cultivated as a realistic dream–not a trite idea of “changing the world,” and certainly not something confined to Silicon Valley startups. If tech offers the only arena for ambitious people to realize their dreams of greatness, then it will continue its monopoly on ambitious people.

People do want to change the world. If the only place that tells them this is possible is a startup, then they will join the startup. Needless to say, we don’t need more ambitious people developing AI chatbots. They are needed elsewhere. The great crises of the 21st century are marked by a Western inability to take constructive, decisive action. The handling of the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, and the climate crisis were confused, half-hearted, and lacking in vision. If we still cultivated greatness in politics and public service, how different would our leadership look? How different would our history look?

Dismissing the influence of individuals does not only discourage ambitious leadership. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of power. Those who do not understand power will always fail to wield it properly. Given that the political left has shown itself incapable of effectively wielding power in the West for decades now, it is the political left–the side most hostile to the concept of historical greatness–that should try to understand greatness so it may understand power.

The current understanding of power relies on large-scale analysis of the trends that provide power: trends in economic development, technological changes, artistic movements, and demographic shifts. The emphasis on trends reveals the common bias towards averages. The average may be easily modeled, analyzed, and controlled. Most moments are average; most people are average. Because scientists, economists, and historians better understand the average, they also overrate the importance of the average.

In my personal life I often think about high-leverage moments, the rare times when life seems to hinge and multiple paths appear. A few high-leverage moments may play a greater role in your life than hundreds of “average” weeks. Performance in a few hours during the interview for your dream job, for example, matters more than your performance over months of average work.

In history high-leverage moments matter greatly too. Nassim Taleb popularized the concept of the Black Swan, the high-profile, surprising, rare events that shape history and culture. Taleb accurately criticized the psychological biases that blind forecasters to the importance of unexpected and unusual events. Taleb’s emphasis on statistics and predictability, though, give the concept an air of randomness that suppresses the role of human will. Just as there are Black Swan events, there are Black Swan people. Historical theories revolving around trends can account no better for high-leverage individuals than they can for high-leverage moments.

The French Revolution was the first Black Swan of the modern age. France during the Revolution was a consequential time and place, where great fortunes could be built and lost, where old orders crumbled, and where new talent could quickly prove itself. In Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, one left-leaning character in the novel romantically remembers the revolutionary era decades later: “People really lived, a man could assert himself, prove his strength! Mere lawyers gave orders to generals, and ragamuffins defeated kings.”

But high-leverage moments do not produce high-leverage individuals–the proverbial Great Men–as a mechanical cause and effect. A high-leverage moment provides the necessary but not sufficient environment for greatness. After all, many dynamic environments have collapsed into chaos in the absence of good leadership. Many innovative companies fail; many powerful armies fumble huge advantages; many potentially historic moments disappear into air.

The most recent high-leverage moment in our culture, the COVID pandemic, proves instructive. Few of us can point to any historically “great” personality emerging from this extremely trying moment. The two rival presidents, Trump and Biden, lacked the power and dynamism to effectively govern and lead the country. The response was mostly handled at the state level, but while many governors rose and fell in popularity based on their responses, none could mount a decisive response to a global pandemic whose effects stretched beyond state borders. Anthony Fauci? For a time he was cast as the great symbol of the time, but the CDC, too, lacked the power to control the virus. The skeptical and cautious personality of a scientist hamstrung his ability to become a high-leverage individual as well. This great moment, then, passed the United States by without leaving any Great Person in its wake. The closest candidate we can find in this era was, of all people, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. The Fed board alone had the power to enact far-reaching policy unprecedented in speed and scope: Powell, more than any individual of his time, could play the Napoleonic role. Even so, the comparison doesn’t fit the cautious bureaucrat well.

Another candidate for our era’s Great Man

Before Napoleon, France also lacked distinctive personalities who could right the ship during its period of chaos. After the fall of the Jacobins in Thermidor, Revolutionary France was ruled by a succession of men historically notable for their cowardice, scheming, and treachery. The Directory era was a high-leverage moment, to be sure. The Directory managed to keep France running through foreign invasion, domestic insurrection, and financial instability. But few great personalities leap off the page of the Directory history books. The characteristic man of the era was the loathsome playboy Paul Barras, who distinguished himself by his ability to survive coups and screw over political opponents.

In contrast, Napoleon distinguished himself through his political acumen as well as his extraordinary military skill. He used a functioning system–the army–to take over and reform a dysfunctional system–the Directory. While the politicians of the Directory were largely scheming nobodies, the French military had already become the most effective fighting force of the era. Napoleon only represented the height of a golden generation of French military leaders. He employed some of the great commanders of history as his marshals–men like Lannes, Davout, and Murat. Some, like Massena (son of a shopkeeper) or Augereau (son of a fruit-seller) came from even more humble origins than Napoleon. Some of them almost matched him in brilliance (and ego).

French general, Swedish king, rival of Napoleon.

But none of these great generals (except perhaps Marshal Bernadotte, the Frenchman who somehow died peacefully as King of Sweden) possessed Bonaparte’s vision in both war and politics. None combined the charisma of a great leader, the tactical genius of a revolutionary battlefield commander, and the vision to turn France into a modern, centralized state. That France saw so many skilled generals in this time points to a broader military system functioning well. That France saw Napoleon rise to command points to an ideal marriage of man and time period. His personality and skills–young, forward-thinking, bold, aggressive–were the perfect fit for a France in turmoil and a changing military order that rewarded offensive tactics and speed.

Did Napoleon benefit from trends? Of course. Before Napoleon emerged, other generals had wielded the great army of revolutionary France to achieve a miracle: surviving internal political strife, civil war, and invasions on all sides. That revolutionary France withstood this onslaught shows the power of its emerging republic and military. Napoleon achieved fame by achieving a second miracle: defeating Austria and winning the War of the First Coalition with a ragtag army of 30,000 men in one year. This success shows the difference that Napoleon’s personal skill made. While the French army could stave off disaster without Napoleon, with him it could win decisive victories.

Not only did Napoleon benefit from the trends of a great military, but his specific personality benefited from his exact time and place. The very traits that led Napoleon to such dazzling success could only flourish in a very specific environment. Were he born at a different time Napoleon would have been simply ordinary–or worse, actively maladapted to a world not suited for his unusual talents and temperament. A Napoleon born 30 years earlier would have languished in an inflexible Ancien Regime French army, cut off from advancement by his mediocre connections and birth on a backwards island in the Mediterranean. He might have spent his life fantasizing in vain about becoming a great conqueror and statesman of history, never having the chance to realize that potential. A Napoleon born 70 years later might have successfully risen through the ranks of the military, but his aggressive nature could have turned him into one of the notorious butchers of World War I, throwing millions of men at trenches to be turned into ground meat. Many men died in the First World War because their generals blindly followed the example of Napoleon and his great battlefield victories without understanding that the nature of war had changed to favor defense over offense.

So the trendists are, in a sense, correct when they say that Napoleon, like all “great men,” was in the right place at the right time. Napoleon did benefit from the trends of the time: he harnessed the forces of nationalism to build a formidable citizen-army, and from the increasing power of the centralized French state that enabled him to wield more power than previous generations of rulers. But I repeat: these conditions are necessary, but not sufficient, for a Napoleon to emerge. Even Karl Marx, the original leftist historian, had to concede that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.” Who was Marx talking about? Napoleon’s nephew, naturally.

No need for a modern Napoleon

Has there been a decline in Greats since the time of Napoleon? Every stable society hates greatness. By nature it cannot be predicted, controlled, or managed. Technical societies especially tend to favor the algorithm, the well-honed plan, the automatic response of institutions to the vagaries of human agency. High-leverage moments tend to correlate with crisis and instability, especially in rapidly-changing hot societies. And the very nature of a system based on the charisma of a single individual also exposes it to their whims. For all his success Napoleon had many failures.

One of Napoleon’s greatest mistakes illustrates the knife’s edge of history, where greatness can lead directly to evil. In late 1801, Napoleon was considering what to do with the troubled colony of Saint-Domingue, now called Haiti. After a bloody revolution, the ex-slaves of the island had achieved stability and autonomy under their leader, the great Toussaint L’Overture (himself a great man of equal stature to Napoleon). As he weighed his options, Napoleon wrote a draft of a letter to Toussaint L’Ouverture. In the letter, he would have recognized Toussaint’s new government and worked together to establish a future for Haiti within the French colonial empire. Had Napoleon simply sent that letter, the history of Haiti would be very different. Napoleon vacillated, back and forth, but he ultimately kept the letter in his desk. He did not send it to Toussaint: he decided to send an expedition to invade the island.

Trends were undoubtedly present–the influence of white pro-slavery planters, the economic value of a rich slave-based colony, the appeal of French national pride, the promise of further military glory, the influence of his wife Josephine. But there was a single man who had a choice to make, a choice that was seemingly fluid until the final high-leverage moment. Here, the Great Man made a colossal error.

Charismatic leaders conflict with democratic norms, make frequent errors of judgment, and create a fragile state of affairs relying on the decisions of a single person. You cannot rely on some talented leader as a recipe for instant success. The greatest leaders build great institutions which survive them. These institutions, in turn, inevitably squash the development of future greats. In average times, the rules of trends prevail.

But in times of turmoil, no well-tuned system can match well-directed human agency. In the face of grand global crises, our systems have hardened into more stable and less dynamic forms. As society cools off, more and more fields in contemporary society have calcified to the point where agency feels impossible. We see increased inequality, sclerotic political parties, nepotism in the arts, and the creation of a new global aristocracy, more wealthy and out-of-touch than the Ancien Regime. The ancient future may even revert to the norms of the ancient past, where hereditary elites rule as self-satisfied figureheads of static systems. It is not a question of whether we need a Napoleon today: could we even produce one?

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Against mass nomadism

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a certain conversation you will repeat every time you travel somewhere and meet someone you know. Meet your friend, exchange some pleasantries, and begin the ritual. You will talk about where you live, and then you will talk about moving. “Have you ever thought about moving here? I love where I live, but sometimes I want to move.” The prospect exists as a kind of low-level pressure, an unspoken expectation that you will not stay where you are. Move, and people will ask what has improved. Don’t move, and they will ask when you will start living life and move already. Why not move?

If you work on a laptop, you’ve had these conversations. You have had them in person with coworkers. You have had them in airport bars. The details may change, but one thing remains the same: comparison. Anyone with a professional job in our vast, globalized Creative Class can mouth the words along with me. Have you thought about __ city? My friend from college just moved there after getting a remote job and they say they love it. The weather is really nice (for 4 months, but the summers are just dry heat) and there are lots of cool people there. But what about __ city? The restaurants are great there too. All fusion cuisine. Why not move?

Just consult the subreddit r/SameGrassButGreener, where people debate which city they should move to. The specifications are lengthy–weather, food, nightlife, diversity, job market, political leanings. Sprawling metropolitan areas are neatly ranked, mapped, and graded based on a rational, weighted matrix of key performance indicators.

Some take the plunge and move. The rest of us just speculate, perusing “best cities 2025 rankings” like you might search for your dream car. Uh-oh, the reviews don’t speak too highly of where you live.

Go wallow in some romance. Live like the beautiful people do, where the sun hits their perfect skin and smartphone cameras just right. Join the citizens of the world, those who live life to the fullest–not those chained to a desk. Work if you must (and you must, let’s be honest), but at least perch that laptop somewhere beautiful and cheap. You know you are not living your best life–because you are trapped in one place. Why not move?

It all started from an innocent place: that experiences bring you more happiness than material possessions. My own Millennial generation embraced this maxim wholeheartedly. There was hope that this would lead to less consumerism–perhaps even a healthier planet, less choked by plastic garbage and cheap clothes. (The 2010s were a more hopeful time, before the onslaught of Shein and Temu).

But nothing escapes the contest of the market, and (with the help of social media) the market quickly turned experiences into consumer goods. The number of likes a photo gets allows you to quantitatively track the value of an experience. Numbers, numbers, numbers: you can price an experience. Influencers made this explicit, directly converting their life experiences into money. The economy of experience then whirred to life. Social media, budget airlines, travel shows–travel became the raison d’etre for anyone who has decided that classic materialism was a thing of the crass past, not the enlightened present. People now compare their travel experiences the way suburban Boomer dads might compare the size of their boats–and the richest among us enjoy the biggest and best vacations.

When we see the social media feeds of the wealthy skiing in Switzerland, SCUBA diving in the South Pacific, and bumping lines in Tulum, we scramble for the knock-offs. In previous eras people would copy the rich by buying massive cars and sprawling McMansions. Only the rubes do that now–it is gauche to own an estate if it is in suburban Phoenix instead of Provence or Pacific Palisades. Conspicuous consumption has not died, but it is no longer the basis of the status portfolio. Now the centerpiece is the expensive vacation. The improved version of mass consumption is mass tourism.

Barcelona in the summer, just as we always imagined

But mass tourism has already become a little passé too. Every gaggle of English lads spends weekends in Spain now. The allure of a quick visit to Barcelona is quickly drowned out by teeming crowds and drunken football chants. As of 2025 the backlash against mass tourism, especially in Europe, is starting to knock it down as an aspirational activity. The anti-travel op-eds and think pieces will grow from a trickle to a surge in the next few years. Just as boomer-style conspicuous consumption has become unhip, mass tourism is already being replaced by a new ideal lifestyle. Time to get in on the ground floor of your next opportunity in status investment!

The new aspiration is mass nomadism.

Nomadism, the most common contemporary ideal of the “good life”, is a life where one moves around different places, living around the world semi-permanently for a few months to a few years at a time. The nomad is a full-time experience-seeker, a sommelier of cities. Nomadism is the refined next stage of the evolution of tourism. Tourists just visit different places: nomads live there. The tourist tries on a new culture for a weekend: the nomad immerses themselves in a culture while remaining cosmopolitan, unanchored to any one location for long.

This lifestyle was pioneered by travel bloggers as far back as the 2000s. The Internet facilitated the creation of the archetypal digital nomad, who could remain connected to society even as they moved from place to place. Today they can be found all around the world, especially in cheap, warm climates: Mexico City, Lisbon, Thailand, Croatia. Within the United States, vanlife was a more downscale version of this lifestyle, swapping the exoticism of foreign lands with the rough-and-tumble appeal of Americana-style roadtripping. Throughout the 2010s, the allure of this ideal grew, but it remained niche and unavailable to most people.

The pandemic and the work-from-home revolution made this lifestyle suddenly attainable to millions of people, in the same way budget airlines made tourism attainable to the masses. In the 2020s, nomadism reigns ascendent. If the entire bourgeoisie now works in digital jobs, then everyone may be a digital nomad. It is the quintessential dream-life of the digital world. Many young people from around the world (although they tend to be European) have told me that they want nothing more than to travel all the time and see the world. This ideal sets the stage for all those conversations about moving: the more you move, the closer you approach this ideal nomad lifestyle.

The nomadic lifestyle seems to add an air of authenticity to the mere pleasure pursuit of crass mass tourism. In theory, the nomad connects more deeply with a place by spending more time there. The tourist engages with an economy of mass tourism: hotels, Airbnbs, Internet lists, approved landmarks and activities: the pyramids of Teotihuacan, the temples of Bali, the fetish clubs of Berlin. In contrast, the nomad creates their own economy, adding an individual stamp to their experiences that the mass-produced tourist–rushed from airport to hotel to guided tour–can never hope to match

.Those in the know already sniff that tourists are not really worldly: you have to spend at least a month in some mid-size European city to really know it. Given that, at least in America, moving has actually become less common than in the past, living in different places is now a more salient sign of wealth and status than simply traveling for a weekend. Anyone can hop on a budget airline to Greece now: can they spend the summer there?

Nomadism thus appears to sidestep the tacky overconsumption of mass tourism. Authenticity, however, is illusory for the nomad. Increased time in one place does not solve the sticky issues of tourism. It makes them worse. Everything you hate about tourists is only amplified by the concept of the nomad. If culture is now fashion, then nomadism is fast fashion.

Take one common complaint about mass tourism: that it converts historic areas of cities like Venice and Paris into huge theme parks. Nomads go further still. If mass tourism converts an experience into a consumer good, then mass nomadism converts an entire city into one giant experience–the ultimate product.

I don’t know which city this was designed for. It doesn’t matter.

Cities now advertise their “amenities,” as if the entire metropolis were some “luxury” apartment complex. You know the type: orange balconies, named “The Gantry” or “City Launch,” filled with unused fire pits and grills, vying for some archetypal quiet tenant with a laptop job.

Cities have changed in the post-industrial economy from lived-in places with livelihoods and cultures connected to their history and geography to interchangeable resorts, vying with other cities to offer the best version of the same bars, restaurants, and gyms. After all, industries are not tied to specific places in the post-industrial West–Pittsburgh does not make steel, Chicago does not produce beef, and Silicon Valley does not build anything out of silicon. There is just a vast, transient pool of cloud money that goes where it wishes, across borders and oceans, and cities must try to bottle a bit of it before it moves onto the next place. Cities are generic places to do generic work, no different than a generic apartment complex.

They have been entirely engulfed by what Kyle Chayka referred to as “AirSpace,” a “sterile aesthetic” that has engulfed enough Airbnbs, breweries, and cafes as to comprise an entire global ecosystem. If a city is now a resort, then why not compare them like they are destinations on TripAdvisor? Young, well-off professionals in the Creative Class compare cities by judging the weather, the outdoor recreation opportunities, the quality of the nightlife, the restaurants–then weigh the categories, average them, and produce the Ultimate City Ranking.

Nomads go even further. They are the super-consumers of the city as product.

Nomads contribute far more to the homogenization of cities than tourists do. After all, tourists participate in a parallel world that can be safely siloed away from locals. As a San Francisco local, for instance, I never complain about Fisherman’s Wharf. The site functions as a useful tourist containment zone. I just avoid the whole area, and I never have to see the tourist families tramping into Hard Rock Cafe. The tourists who want authenticity, though, want your favorite “cool local bar”. They want your hidden gems. Yet even they leave after a week. The nomad makes things still worse: they will set up shop in that local bar. Tourists stay in hotels; nomads gentrify your neighborhood. Tourists are like mosquitoes: annoying, but easily avoided. Nomads are more like ringworms: painful to remove, constantly sucking on their host, parasitic.

Nomads thus play a leading role in the ongoing trends of globalization and homogenization that so many–including many nomads–decry. The actual numbers of people who live out this ideal lifestyle may still be small, but this vanguard exercises a disproportionate impact on many cities due to their wealth and prestige. It didn’t take many Americans to prompt the furious complaints of Mexico City residents that their fashionable neighborhoods were being gentrified by gringos. The nomad lifestyle may be sold as an authentic experience of other cultures, but in reality it erodes individual cultures to shape them into AirSpace clones. Gentrification goes global.

Kennedy at the Cape

The phenomenon of nomadism has roots in the habits of old money. After all, our elites have long “summered” one place (as the overlords of Cape Cod and Long Island used to say) and wintered somewhere else. The upper classes have elevated this traditional lifestyle to new heights. The upper class of any given country now live in a kind of single cosmopolitan country: they send their children to be educated at Oxford or Harvard, summer with their yachts in southern France, shop in London and Tokyo and New York, and fly to conferences in Geneva and Dubai. They spread their money across borders to avoid taxation, and buy up property in certain “investment cities”--New York, London, Hong Kong--to both hide their money and plunder the riches not just of one nation, but all nations. As corporations have grown multinational, so too have the masters running them. Houses are now assets to be dispassionately traded: cities might be viewed as simply bundles of investments. The homogenization of cities is something of a perk, if they are to be traded more efficiently on a market.

You can always detect a certain whiff of condescension when fashionable people denigrate popular cities as “too touristy”--people rarely say that about Aspen or Antibes. Any attraction loses its luster when too many of the “wrong people” start showing up there. The search for more untouched destinations, more exclusive vacations, and more involved experiences starts to just resemble a classic status game. Subconsciously nomads may just be aping the long-established customs of the rich–”summering” by another name.

It is tempting, then, to simply view nomadism as the next evolution in tourism, the way fashion evolves to forever stay one step ahead of the rubes. The summer and winter homes have long been hallmarks of the nobility. You could argue that mass nomadism is a simple extension of old elite trends, different only in scale.

But the rich still participate in a social scene when they “summer” and “winter” in different places. Their social world remains the same: it merely rotates between locations. Nomadism, in contrast, implies a casting away of one’s social setting–a bold reinvention and recreation of an identity. It is, in many ways, a kind of last gasp of the countercultural spirit that struggles to exist today. Being rebellious, after all, has never been so expensive. The previous milestones of conventional life that were previously taken for granted are now seen as some sort of Herculean achievement. Now that counterculture is on life support, being a nomad feels like one of the only viable avenues for expressing that old desire for rebellion and uniqueness. The bohemian ideal of the adventuring wanderer has never really died, even as our world has grown connected and comfortable enough to remove most of the danger from travel. Total break from society in a globalized world is impossible: the romantic ideal of the nomad is the closest thing we have. The media has worked hard to keep up this ideal as one of the few attainable lifestyles people can aspire to.

Who is living the dream: the man on the left, or the man on the right?

Ask yourself this, eager globalist: when you watch a travel show, do you relate more to the traveler or the people the traveler meets? Do you see yourself in, say, Anthony Bourdain, or in the locals he talks to and eats with in Beirut, Hanoi, or West Virginia? Most people would prefer to be the globetrotting travel host, of course. That job remains the ultimate aspiration, long after Bourdain himself violently exited that career. Sample all the cultures for the sake of your own refined palate. Transcend place, keep only taste. The enlightened view is that they are all equal; thank god the people building these cultures don’t think so. Otherwise they might close up their street-food stands, log into Airbnb, and start traveling too. Who will make the pupusas then?

The people who actually make those places special--the people who know its culture and keep it alive--are exotic set decoration. The task of carrying on a culture is for the quirky locals, not for the cosmopolitan, jet-setting vanguard. Those who aspire to be tolerant and worldly must do so by shedding their own culture and sense of place. There is no better way to shed a sense of place than to move frequently. One can speak in a generic accent, eat food cooked by others, and try on different rituals and customs for size. The locals may provide cultural fuel for this propulsive, ever-moving lifestyle, but their life–colorful though it may be–is nothing to aspire to. The simple act of staying in one place becomes exotic, and therefore culturally inert. Local life is now the stuff of museums.

Like any aspirational lifestyle, of course, nomadism must be dragged into the ever-evolving culture war, with locals representing the other side of the battle. Locals are now coded as conservative, reactionary, and simply outdated. Nomads represent the pinnacle of the progressive, forward-thinking culture that governs the cultural wing of the liberal West. Nomadism stands in for an entire contemporary mindset, and so locals get lumped in with everything–good or bad–that opposes global liberalism.

This explains the curious fact that, even as nomadism becomes our ascendent ideal, the opposite ideal of localism has never been more defended and valorized. Consider the local food movement, media personalities playing up exaggerated regional accents, sports teams trumpeting mottos like “Rooted in Oakland” (before immediately leaving Oakland for a wealthier city). Call it Newton’s first law of culture wars: every movement provokes an equal and opposite reactionary movement. Defenses of local living, which used to seem so natural and obvious that it hardly needed defending, now grow in response to the nomadic tendency. After all, leaving one’s home was once considered a severe form of punishment: banishment. But now settling somewhere is the punishment: house arrest in a single city.

A traditional cafe in the romantic city of Venice

Indeed, the very difficulty of conventional life explains the desire for escape. The life of a local seems dreary and thankless: few seem to be thriving in joyful, close-knit communities. All our cities are affected by the pitiless forces of neoliberal homogenization, not just tourist centers. Complain all you want that there is a McDonald’s in Venice: how many McDonald’s does your average suburb contain? If authenticity cannot be found at home, then why not go elsewhere? Travel has taken on quasi-religious overtones for many young people. It is as if traveling accesses some sort of higher world now unavailable to the secular subject, stuck in regular life with no hope of transcendence. You can no longer ascend to Heaven, but perhaps you can fly there on Emirates.

Status, media romanticization–these explanations do not truly capture the deep yearning people have now for escape. Most nomads are simply searching for the very things that have become rare and precious in a marketized world: authenticity, connection, meaning. We desperately lack community in our homes, and feel that painful hole of solitude and yearning. We must travel across the world to visit a famous park while avoiding the park near our own home. The nomad wants to take that wonderful feeling they get on vacation, and also connect that desire to some deeper principle.

Loneliness, anxiety, rootlessness, nihilism: these are the defining human problems of our age. Nomads at least attack these problems head-on. But the only way anyone knows how to solve these problems is with market-based tools. These tools erode the very facets of human connection and belonging we came there to absorb from these destinations.

That word, absorb, reveals the contradiction at the heart of nomadism. The nomad comes to places to absorb, to consume, to “soak up.” It is a strictly transactional relationship: provide money, receive meaning. The essential distinction between the nomad and the citizen is the difference between an investment property and a home. It is the difference between producing a place and consuming a place. It is the difference between building a community and passively enjoying the fruits of a community others worked on. This mindset of mass consumerism remains unchanged at the heart of mass tourism and mass nomadism. It cannot form the basis of the good life, no matter what mask it wears.

To truly “live” somewhere, consider modeling your relationship to the people of a place around a more basic social unit: the family. In your community and your family, you are engaged in a history involving both vast events before your birth and mundane acts that you took part in. You are also bound in a web of social relations and obligations, duties to the people around you–just as you have duties to your family. Not to get too Freudian, but the family forms the model for any collection of people. Comparing cities to families shows how bizarre the whole conversation around moving places has become.

Suppose you have just returned from a vacation with your family–a cozy holiday visit at the parents’ house, or a summer trip somewhere warm and leafy. You see your friends again, and you talk about the time you spent with the people who raised you and saw you grow. You talk about their quirks, annoying or charming. You show your friends photos of your family. Suppose someone then says, “If you're trying to optimize for nurturing and earning potential, you would be better off with Jason's dad. Your parental love budget will go furthest with Andy's dad, but you would be compromising on Thanksgiving dinners. Both good options. Maybe try out both dads for a few months and see who you like better before committing to a new parent.”

It only sounds strange to compare mothers and fathers as if they were car models because we still think of families as collections of people–idiosyncratic, opaque, full of bewildering traditions, unknowable by outsiders. But places have become inert as the bonds between their citizens dissolved. Cities can only be ranked, exchanged, and discarded like products when humanity has evaporated from them.

This is not to say that no one should ever move, any more than it is true that every family is perfect and that every family member owes their family absolute devotion. But we do owe something to our family, because they are an indelible part of our history and personality. The same is true of a homeland–a motherland, if the connection wasn’t clear enough. Moving should be taken seriously, as a regeneration of social obligations and duties–a form of communal adoption by the people of another land. The meaning that so many seek will spring naturally from these duties, not from a lack of duties.

My idea of the good life

The nomadic route can feel easier in the face of this terrifying gulf of meaning. Building roots in a community is much like spending time with annoying family members: hard, thankless, frustrating work. You feel constrained by having to make peace with people you don’t like and don’t feel you have chosen. Going to some event every week, having to endure the cold stares of strangers, making small talk: this is hard enough even if you feel a strong desire to join with others.

Picking up and leaving can feel like the easier option–and capitalism excels at offering you the easier option. It is the characteristic attitude of our age: knowing what makes things worse, doing them anyway because they are easier than any alternative, then telling yourself that whatever you are doing is actually making things better. Our latest ideal of the good life is our latest way of dodging the difficult task of building a good life.

Move if you must. Move for work, for love, for family–hell, move just to make a change! Sometimes you really do need to become a new person. But don’t become a nomad. Try to become kin with our neighbors and community whenever you move. Regardless of your fears of not being accepted in a new place, others do know the difference between strangers seeking to take and hopeful neighbors seeking to give.

That is, after all, what you probably wanted all along. Fantasies of the good life always include other people.

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The lizard brain, the monkey brain, and the human brain

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Great ideas appear twice: first as literature, then as meme.

If you were ever a Sensitive Young Man like me, you may have read Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf to make sense of your own internal conflict and crisis of meaning. The protagonist of the novel feels himself torn between two natures: one high, one low. One human, one animal–the animal being a wolf. Yes, this classic 1927 novel from a Nobel Prize winner is the inspiration for that meme: "there are two wolves inside you." I would add: there are not just two wolves inside you. There are three.

The biologists, the boring doctors, the Lovers of Science tell us that we have one brain, just one large fleshy organ in our heads, but I think every one of us knows that this isn’t true. We have at least two brains, and they fight all the time. Internal conflict can be well explained by thinking of the mind as consisting of two separate agents with their own conflicting drives and cognitive methods. This two-level model of the mind has a very particular structure that tends to recur across time and cultures.

The two-level structure always takes the form of a “higher” and “lower” brain. The lower level is associated with instinct: it is hedonistic, impulsive, self-centered, and crude. The higher level is associated with reason: it is rational, noble, elevated, but sometimes a bit weak. The basic pattern pops up again and again in psychology: Freud’s id and superego, Kahneman’s “fast” and “slow” thinking, Jung’s shadow and ego ideal, and most generally, the unconscious and conscious minds.

But these psychologists were just renaming concepts that date back deep into prehistory. Take this dichotomy further and the “higher” brain stands for abstraction, ideas, and the soul; the “lower” brain becomes associated with matter and the body. We gravitate towards the two-level model because it fits so well with so many other well-worn dualistic cliches: science vs faith, the Earthly City and the City of God, the Enlightenment vs Romanticism, civilization vs savagery.

There’s one more dualism the two-level model suggests: human vs animal. The “higher” brain, of course, stands in for humanness and human supremacy, while animals become identified with the lower level of pure instinct. Intelligence? Animals lack reason. Animals are dumb.

Even when we do acknowledge animal intelligence, we just can’t resist comparing them negatively to us, God’s chosen monkey. The scale is simple: humans at one end, the dumbest animal you can imagine (maybe a slug, or some sort of flesh-eating bacteria) at the other end. The marvelous intelligence of great apes, dolphins, whales, crows, elephants, and other social animals just get endlessly compared to some standard of “humanness.” Chimpanzees and toads differ as much in intelligence as chimpanzees differ from us humans, but when the two sides are “dumb” animals and “smart” humans, chimps get unfairly placed on the dumb side.

I don’t mean to criticize the number two. Two is a good number. If you’re creating a hugely simplified mega-model of thought, reducing the mind to just two systems definitely makes things easier. If you’re looking to actually explain human behavior, though, the two-level model is just too simplified. It downplays the similarities we have to certain social animals, while reducing all internal conflicts to a battle between two urges: conscious vs unconscious, instinctive vs rational, head vs heart. There is a reason triangles are the most stable shape. I propose expanding the minimum number of agents acting within our brains from two to three. In the broadest, most pop-psych sense possible, these three levels are the lizard brain, the monkey brain, and the human brain.

A marine iguana I saw in the Galapagos, with not a care in the world

The lizard brain is the fundamental level of our brain that we share with all animals (not just lizards). It governs our most fundamental evolutionary drives: the need to survive and reproduce, the urge to increase pleasure and avoid pain. Heap all the animal stereotypes you want onto the humble lizard brain: instinctive, unconscious, maybe a little dumb. Neurologically, it tends to reside in the limbic system and amygdala, controlling fight-or-flight instincts. Most animals manage just fine with this brain alone–from an evolutionary point of view, the hugely abundant but low-intelligence rat is much more “successful” than the high-intelligence, endangered bonobo. Importantly, this lizard brain is solitary–other animals are just competitors or potential mates. The lizard brain is a selfish and lonely one.

Some highly social animals developed a second brain system. I call it the monkey brain, but I mean this term in a complimentary way–not to imply that this is the part of the brain that flings shit at other people. This is not just me making up a hypothetical brain system. Growing research (pioneered by Robin Dunbar, who also created the “Dunbar number”) has examined the capabilities of this “social brain”, identifying regions like the medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and temporal cortex, along with mechanisms like mirror neurons and the reward system of dopamine. Living in complex groups required animals to develop all kinds of sophisticated social skills: vocal and gestural communication, sharing, coalitions, recognition, etc.

The great apes have developed this part of the brain to the greatest degree: chimpanzees, in particular, display social dynamics almost as complex as that of humans, with dominance hierarchies, organized war campaigns, and strong family ties. But other social animals have insanely impressive displays of intelligence too. Elephants have been observed mourning the dead; ravens display consolation to other ravens in disputes; sperm whales display symbolic markers of clan affiliation in their complex language of click-like vocalizations. These animal social brains lack certain markers of human brains, such as self-knowledge and theory of mind, but social animals display complex emotions, communication patterns, and even rudimentary cultures. This second brain system is not necessarily more intelligent than the lizard brain: the solitary cephalopods possess their own sophisticated form of spatial intelligence. But it makes more sense to classify humans not as a type of “non-animal”, but as a unique subset of a different duality: between the socially intelligent animals and the more solitary animals.

As much as I love monkeys, I have to admit unavoidable human supremacism. There is just some special sauce that separates us from even the most intelligent social animals. This third brain–the human brain–is marked by abstract symbolic thought, recursive language, novel problem-solving, and some sort of self-awareness. It resides in brain regions like the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Especially in the age of AI, people love speculating about what makes us so special–rationality, consciousness, the soul. Who knows. Whatever is categorically distinct about humans, though, does not lie in our social structures, social drives, or social emotions. These exist on some sort of continuum with other social animals.

I have to confess something: I am not a neuroscientist. I threw in those references to brain regions because our society just worships science (it’s had its moments, I’ll admit). You can’t draw neat lines in the brain to find the lizard brain or the monkey brain. The true usefulness of this model comes in representing these three systems as separate agents with competing fundamental desires. Once you map these desires to the three brains, you can start to explain behavior without simplifying everything to just the conflict of two different urges.

These three hierarchical systems map very nicely onto Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. The five levels of his pyramid can be simplified into this three-level system. The lizard brain governs the two lowest levels of the hierarchy: safety needs and physiological needs. Give your pet lizard food, water, warmth, and rest in a safe terrarium, and he will smile and want nothing else. (Until he is hungry again.)

The monkey brain governs the next two levels of the hierarchy: belongingness needs and esteem needs. These two needs are social: they come fundamentally from others. We can obtain safety and security by ourselves. But we can only receive love and esteem from other people. Solitary confinement in a well-attended room, a la Oldboy, might satisfy all your physiological and security needs, but to the monkey it is torture. The traditional two-level theory of the brain splits the pyramid of needs somewhere in this area, saying that only humans care about esteem–although social animals like apes clearly demonstrate this need too. Or it cops out by saying that social needs are “lower” needs.

The final level of the hierarchy belongs to the human brain. Describing the final level of this pyramid is tricky–this is nothing less than the task of describing the ultimate desire of humanity. Ascribing a universal, monomythical base to every ideal that has ever been offered throughout history smacks of arrogance. (I find Joseph Campbell unbearably insufferable for this reason.) You cannot avoid some cultural bias when taking this on: Maslow, writing in the individualist society of 1940s America, originally called this level “self-actualization.” He later shifted to a different term, one which better encompasses the wild diversity of characteristically human desires: “transcendence needs.”

Transcendence is more a manner of desiring than a desire in itself. The human condition is marked by consciousness: a self-knowledge of our own existence on Earth. The other two brains are marked by the ceaseless but unaware striving for ultimately impossible goals. The lizard brain is purely hedonistic. It is impossible to achieve maximum pleasure all the time, but an animal does not consciously know this. It just endlessly seeks. When they run experiments with rats showing them pressing buttons for hits of cocaine over and over until they stop eating and ultimately starve, scientists are exploiting this blind spot of the lizard brain. The brain of these rats cannot understand that they cannot live in a cocaine-induced state of bliss forever. The reasoning is simple: cocaine feels good, so if there is more cocaine, go get it. Maximum pleasure guides the lizard brain.

The apes of Chimp Empire, in their endless struggle for status

Similarly, the monkey brain wants maximum belonging. It does not consciously realize that it is impossible to actually achieve all the love you could ever want at all times. When you operate under the influence of the monkey brain,you do “irrational” things like perform for the desires of other people who you don’t even like. The monkey brain makes you go to a party even though you know you will have a bad time there. It doesn’t matter: the monkey brain wants more friends, more love, more status, all the time. I imagine the ultimate dream of a chimpanzee would be building a constantly expanding empire of servile, awestruck chimps who worship their leader and provide this God-chimp with endless acclaim and sexual access. (We are very fortunate no chimp has tried to realize this dream.)

Most of all, animals strive for survival when they are all doomed to eventual death. Animals fundamentally desire that which is impossible: they engage in a struggle for survival that they will certainly lose. Yet they do not seem to know this (and I hope they never learn).

Humans not only desire the impossible: we know what we want is impossible. We are conscious of the contradictory nature of our lives. We search for constant pleasure when we know we must suffer pain. We strive for love when we must fundamentally exist alone. Most of all, humans want eternal life in the face of certain death. This conscious knowledge reframes all desires in the shadow of a new ideal: transcendence.

Transcendence captures the full range of unsolvable problems that we spend our lives trying to solve. Transcendence is the oceanic feeling, the yearning for something greater, and the desperate longing for immortality in the face of insurmountable odds. We seek it in art, philosophy, science, religion, meditation, psychoactive drugs, duty to king and country, sports, romantic love, and anything else that connects us to something greater and enduring. We don’t stick to one cognitive method when seeking transcendence: rational reasoning, empirical experiment, aesthetic reflection, and spiritual revelation are all fair game.

What is the goal of this transcendence? Everyone has their answer. It could be meaning, or self-actualization, or return to the womb, or the Form of the Good, or union with God, or nirvana, or a great beer hall in the sky. We might be driven by the will to power, or maybe just the will to life. Maybe it is as simple as transcending death. Ernest Becker posited in his 1973 treatise Denial of Death that human civilization results from the drive to overcome the fear of death through symbolic pursuits called “immortality projects.” This tidy explanation reminds me too much of the troublesome Monomyth, though.

Death seems like the most basic contradiction we seek to overcome. But it is far from the only one. Would some race of immortal elves really feel total satisfaction, give up the struggle for transcendence, and spend eternity happily eating apples and honey in elf-nirvana? Bryan Johnson may disagree, but I doubt it. The first human being to become immortal would immediately set upon some new impossible task--controlling physical reality with their mind, or growing to the size of a planet, or memorizing every book ever written. Death is far from the only frontier. After all, most of us don’t dream about living forever. We dream about flying.

Maybe transcendence is just the drive towards solving unsolvable contradictions, to harnessing the infinite, to somehow living without limits where we are everywhere constrained. Transcendence becomes the only way to escape the contradictions of the physical world–the greatest contradiction being a self-conscious animal that can imagine infinity, move through time and space freely in imagination, yet still die like a dog if you walk into traffic. Maybe it is just the desire to stop being an animal. Whatever this human brain wants, it is hard to satisfy.

If the tricky human brain is hard to satisfy, then working to satisfy three different brains with often contradictory desires can seem impossible. Many people try to simplify human behavior by paring down all our desires to a single part of the brain. Hedonists will say that humans “only” want pleasure. Some will counter by saying that humans “really” just want love and human connection. Some boil everything down to status, a less warm-and-fuzzy form of sociality. And others will pick a specific type of transcendence and posit that we really only want this: we just need beauty, or truth, or knowledge. Every contradictory action and drive has to be explained as some sort of projection from the “original” desire.

More sophisticated models add in that second level to explain internal conflicts: the id and superego wrestling for dominance in Freud’s theories, or Jung’s shadow resisting the ego ideal. But human behavior is so complex that viewing internal conflicts as a simple one-on-one, mano-a-mano struggle fails to clarify things. When you go against some ideal to side with the group, for instance, is that the simple “animal” brain overruling the “higher” human brain? What if you then endure hardship and sacrifice on behalf of the group? When I stuck my hand into an ant-pile to impress my friends in kindergarten, was I operating on animal instinct or human reason? Surely this wasn't the action of animalistic self-preservation. They didn’t even think I was cool.

Is the social desire actually the “higher” desire? What if a person refuses to follow the bidding of some sinister group, but due to a “low” emotion like cowardice? The two-level model seems to assume complete independence of an individual person, denying the essential interconnectedness of human existence. Enter the three-level model: more variables to consider, but far more powerful in explaining behavior.

The three-level brain in college

All three brains must be satisfied in a very complicated balancing act. Each of the three systems exerts control over the others. In the short term, the lizard brain’s desires–security, physiological needs-must be satisfied first. That is not to say that we are entirely ruled by these physical desires. While the lizard brain may be the most “fundamental” part of the brain, it can be overruled by the other systems. Humans and apes have both been known to forgo pleasure and endure pain for the sake of the group–me sticking my hand into an ant-pile was a triumph of the monkey brain over the lizard brain.

Defying the needs of the group and the physical body? It’s difficult, but the human brain can still overrule both the monkey brain and lizard brain. Ascetics, for instance, will undergo physical pain and remove themselves from human society in the search for transcendence. Artists, scientists, and philosophers have been known to neglect their bodies and turn away from social relationships in pursuit of their transcendent practices. (This practice is formally known as graduate school.) To overrule both “lower” brains is tough, but the human brain has a very powerful trick up its sleeve: habit. Habit is the great power of the human brain over the other two systems: humans alone seem to be able to create new instincts within themselves through practice and deliberate training. As intelligent as dogs are, a retriever cannot decide to train itself to instinctively point at prey. Nor can a pointer decide to become a retriever. Even computers lack the ability to independently set goals and then reprogram themselves to accomplish them. Through habit, we can hijack instinct to make it serve long-term objectives.

The advantage of the three-level brain is that it can accurately account for conflicts between social and physical sensations–the monkey brain and lizard brain. The two-level model, meanwhile, tends to selectively categorize social desires either as part of the conscious human level (if it is something “good” like altruism) or part of the unconscious animal level (if it is something “bad” like conformity). But sociality lies somewhere in the middle of these two levels. Social desires can be so intense that people will willingly suffer immense physical pain just to feel loved and accepted, in a way that solitary animals never do. But conversely, the desire for connection, status, and belonging sits somewhere deeper than human reason. Loneliness, social rejection, and heartbreak all have powerful physical side-effects. You can literally die of a broken heart–and this is something we share with social animals. Apes, dolphins, elephants–they all face conflicts too, when deciding between their own welfare and the welfare of the group. But three-level conflicts in the human brain reach new heights of complexity.

It is clearly not as simple as saying that any one part of the brain must necessarily rule the others. But that would make life much more pleasant, for much suffering stems from the conflict between three separate drives within ourselves. It is hard for the human brain to conflict with the monkey brain, and even harder to conflict with the lizard brain. It is easier, for instance, to momentarily deny yourself love and human connection than it is to deny yourself food or sleep.

As much as possible, though, we want the three parts of our brain to be in harmony. But when the three brains conflict, ultimately the most conscious brain–the human brain–has to arbitrate and decide who gets satisfied. Despite what some believe about unconscious desires ruling all our actions, the human brain has a long-term planning advantage that lets it call the shots. Sometimes you really should work on that art project instead of seeing friends, but sometimes the human brain must defer to the monkey brain and release some loneliness. Sometimes your frat hazing gets too intense, and your great referee-in-the-head decides the lizard brain should not take so much suffering to make the monkey brain feel a sense of belonging. And sometimes the human brain can take charge and endure physical pain and social rejection for the sake of some transcendent ideal. It’s not impossible. Humans have outsmarted every animal on Earth, and the human brain can outsmart the pesky animals in its own mind too.

They say two’s company, but three’s a crowd. Adding a third system to your mental model of the brain will definitely add some complexity . But this model explodes the myth of the independent, self-interested mind, placing sociality squarely at the center of human cognition. It gives proper credit to highly intelligent social animals while still clearly delimiting what is human and what is not. And it just works better at explaining the internal conflicts that we all face when three wolves fight.

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Our Ancient Future: the world, hot and cool

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Modern blues, postmodern noise

In order to bury the 20th century, the word “modern” must be thrown into the ground with it. The common belief is that we still live in the “modern” era--the machine age, the advanced civilization of technology and change. Certainly this world of computers and bullet trains and spaceships physically looks modern. They make shows called Modern Family and podcasts called Modern Love. On the Internet they tell you to “reject modernity; embrace tradition.” But “modernity,” which was coined sometime in the 1860s, is old enough to be the only tradition any of us know.

Charlie Chaplin made Modern Times back in 1936. The "modern art" in our museums is over a hundred years old. It's been 70 years since The Jetsons prophesied the future that we should expect (Peter Thiel is still upset we don’t have flying cars). And when we complain–as virtually every cultural commentator, artist, politician, dinner party guest, and local bar patron does–we compare the current state of things to that old “modern world”, or at least how we expect the modern world should have turned out. That strange feeling you get when you wake up, the overwhelming sense of cultural decline and terminal rot that makes you read Substack for essays on civilizational collapse, dates back neatly to a wave of changes that swept through the Western world in the past 50 years–changes that have never been adequately named and categorized. Some call the sea-change “neoliberalism”, others “late-stage capitalism”, others “deindustrialization”. All vague terms, and mostly narrowly focused on economics. The vaguest term of all was coined 50 years ago, by a group of (mostly French) intellectuals, who gravely announced that we had entered the "postmodern" era.

Those intellectuals were right to diagnose the end of modernity. But that term “postmodern” would never be used for catchy movie titles. It long ago transitioned from a topic of serious academic debate to a punching bag. Sometime around the 90s “postmodernism” became a lazy scapegoat for the right and left: anything you don’t like about contemporary culture can be pinned on postmodernism. Hollywood just can’t stop pumping out sequels. The media is biased and ideological. Different political parties can’t agree on what is real. Why? Pin it all on postmodernism, our favorite whipping boy. It explains nothing and covers up everything. The word “postmodern” indicates nothing about this world other than the fact that it comes, chronologically, after modernity. It tells us nothing about the features of this new world: it defines the present by negating the past. The term is so vague now that calling anything “postmodern” feels like some sort of meta-joke, like you know how tired this criticism has become. Things escalated to the point that some tried to describe musicians like Lady Gaga as “post-post-modern”, which marks as good a point as any to declare “postmodernism” completely moribund and ridiculous.

For a brief moment, postmodernism was cool

For all their faults, the postmodernists were just trying to understand the massive changes in art, economics, and culture that began after World War II. We have not exactly advanced much in our grand historical understanding since the 70s. There’s something about computers, the Cold War, social justice, maybe the Chinese Century. It’s all very confusing. Growing up, I recall every history textbook I ever read narrating a clear, objective (sounding) history up until about 1965 or 1970, at which point every text, without fail, would degenerate into a haze of vague euphemisms. If the postmodernists were right, and the great age of modernity ended around that time, then it would explain much of the division, confusion, and rot felt by most areas of culture. Yet despite producing more analysis, essays, and think pieces than any civilization in history, it’s easier for us to just pretend that all the old rules of modernity are still in play. The modern myths–of rationality, growth, linear progress–continue to animate our institutions, but no one quite believes in them anymore. As the postmodernists predicted, this has led to widespread dissatisfaction.

The vibes are not good. 2003 was the last time where a majority of Americans felt “satisfied” with the way things are going in the United States. So what exactly has gone wrong recently? You could definitely blame those (French) scholars who taught us not to “believe in truth.” On one side you can find liberals blaming postmodernism for the “incessant lying” of Trump’s “post-truth” ideology; on the other side you have conservatives claiming that postmodernism is a “direct descendent of fascism.” The word has an image problem. Even academics shy away from analyzing culture and society through a postmodern lens, typically adopting instead the Manichean view of a grand struggle against capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. That these battles essentially reproduce identical struggles from 50 years ago without adding much new only proves the postmodernists annoyingly right. (The SCUM Manifesto of 1967, for my money, blows any contemporary anti-male screed out of the water. I challenge any Substacker to match it.) Postmodernism proved so unpopular that even its original home, academia, booted it out. Postmodernism is now lonely and friendless. That doesn’t mean it is wrong.

I want to reclaim the term postmodernism, now that it is scorned on all sides. Its cold reception might be charitably attributed to marketing errors (like its stupid name) rather than any lack of predictive power. Critic Steven Connor argued in 2020 that “rather than having gone extinct, Post-Modernism has become endemic.” Post-modernism was right to recognize that modernity ended decades ago: it simply failed to fully comprehend what would come after it. Now well into the postmodern era, I think there is enough data to refashion a new understanding of the many implications of the “end of modernity.” Postmodernism recognized the change, even if it could not describe it.

Postmodernism handicapped itself from the beginning by defining itself in negative terms. The first philosopher to bring the term “postmodernism” out of art and into the social sciences, Jean-Francois Lyotard, tried his best to explain the term in The Postmodern Condition (1979): "simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives." Even he seems to know that this definition feels like a cop-out. There’s something disingenuous about saying you favor no grand narratives, speak from no specific culture, and believe in nothing. It sounds like that “worldly” guy at a party who tells you that he has ascended past the quaint limitations that fetter your outdated ways of thinking. And believing in no grand narratives does imply a belief in an even bigger, nihilistic grand narrative. It is logically incoherent as a stance, only making sense as a sort of intellectual fashion. Postmodernity projects no confidence: it merely hides behind modernity, even as it denounces it.

For all the postmodern disdain of grand narratives, it did offer one last story to replace all the old ones. The metanarrative of all metanarratives centers on modernity itself–on the long move from premodernity to modernity to postmodernity–and this story is the key to understanding the current era, and to unearthing whatever postmodernism still has to offer. So what was modernity, what came before it, and what does it mean to live “post” modernity?

The typical, terrible understanding of postmodernism and modernity

The narrative goes that people in premodern societies lived simple, stable lives. Their worldviews were fixed by certain grand narratives given to them by society. This gave their lives meaning, albeit a rigid, fixed meaning. Religion, tradition, monarchy: across the world, people lived a kind of predetermined, unconscious existence mapped out by society. For a feudal peasant, for instance, we look back and suppose that everything in their life was understood: they were Christians, they had to serve their local lord, and they had to fulfill family roles such as “son” or “daughter” until they grew up, took on the new roles of “father” or “mother,” and started the cycle again. Premodernity, whether in medieval Europe or pre-Columbian Mexico, was inhabited by unquestioning savages, living in a happy Dark Age. Then, the story goes, modernity came around and started messing things up.

Sometime in the 16th or 17th century, all kinds of new ideas started floating around, disrupting all previous orders: the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Exploration. In the 19th century modernity gained industrial tools, and new metanarratives began an industrial level of production. New ideologies were pumped out like mass-produced cotton shirts in this century of -isms: liberalism, nationalism, socialism, conservatism, absolutism, nihilism, feminism. These competing grand narratives caused friction and divided communities. In the 20th century they tore the world apart. Millions of people died horrible deaths for ideas: nationalism, fascism, and communism. After the World Wars, people stopped believing in big ideas. Scholars deconstructed the knowledge systems of the past. Now, in a postmodern world, we supposedly have no grand ideas at all. At best, we recycle the symbols of old in timeless pastiches. The intellectuals deconstruct ideas instead of building new ones; artists make sequels and remixes; politics wallows in nostalgia. We are bereft, adrift without meaning. Simply put, in the premodern world there was one source of meaning. In modernity, there were several competing sources of meaning. In postmodernity, there are no sources of meaning.

That is the grand narrative. Yet this story still leaves out a constructive, meaningful definition for postmodernity. The definitions for our current world are defined by negatives: by what it is not. We do not have fixed ideologies, we do not believe in linear progress, we do not imagine a better future. As Mark Fisher said, the future has been canceled. Even when we imagine a different future (flying cars, space travel, aliens), we think our current, confused postmodern subjectivity will never change. But the future will be different–at least from the immediate past. Yet in the great turn of history it will come to resemble an all-but-forgotten world: the premodern world. The further we move from modernity, the further our minds, and the world they create, will come to resemble the ancient past.

In politics, media, economics, science, and culture, our institutions and ways of thinking will change to modes that existed before the disruptions of the modern world. If you want a grand narrative, try this: we will find ourselves in an Ancient Future.

“Ancient Future”: there is a point here

Not a bad dinner party take. Sounds provocative. But I can hear the jokes already. We aren’t riding around in chariots; we don’t wear face paint and dance to make the rain come; we don’t worship god-kings sitting atop golden thrones. Our world doesn’t look like the ancient past; it looks exactly like the modern world did. We drive around in cars, vote in elections, and wear the fast-fashion versions of clothes our grandparents did. We still use the technology of modernity, and technology only continues to develop. If anything, the world just seems to be getting more globalized, more technological, and more modern.

When I refer to this return to the ancient past, I do not mean to say that technology will regress, that we will “return to the Dark Ages,” or that we will suddenly start seeing knights on horseback wandering the countryside. I refer to something more elusive about the past: the premodern mind. It is something fundamental that differs from the modern mind. It is this way of thinking that we will return to.

As Voltaire and Rousseau argued, the people just kept reaping

After all, modernity also began as a type of thought, interacting with material realities. Take a time machine back to Europe in the late 1700s, and look around. It will resemble the medieval world of feudalism. Most ordinary people still worked the land as they had for centuries: they wore the same clothes, used the same tools, and went to the same churches. What was modernity back in the 18th century? A few French philosophers arguing in a salon. A couple of steam-powered mills in the English countryside. A tiny stock market in London, with a handful of corporations trading sugar and spice and everything nice. Modernity at that time lived mostly in the thoughts of some people. But eventually these thoughts would physically change the world, and modernity would reshape Earth in its image. The modern mind, then, preceded the modern world.

The modern mind was defined by adaptation to the central feature of modernity: change. Modernity was fundamentally a dynamic age: it saw populations around the world explode, economic productivity skyrocket, scientific discoveries increase, and culture constantly evolve. Take someone from 1780, put them in a Rip Van Winkle-style deep sleep for 200 years, and awaken them in 1980: every single institution, facet of life, and way of thinking would puzzle and confuse them.

This is distinct from all the world systems of premodernity. From Mexico to Phoenicia to Japan, these systems tended to prize stability, and they evolved in a world that changed slowly. The older the civilization, the longer they tended to last: ancient Egypt survived for more than 3000 years, making the mere thousand-year history of Rome look short-lived. Mythic time spans were even longer: each of the four Hindu yuga cycles lasts for 4.3 million years. To a premodern person, the world felt cyclic: populations would grow and decline, empires would rise and fall, and culture focused on preserving the past instead of transforming the future. Life changed, but the way of life did not. New socioeconomic systems–agriculture, Iron Age empires, feudalism–mutated on geological time spans.

Life at the top of the S curve feels a lot like life at the bottom

All these systems existed in a static world. Modernity created and then fed off a dynamic, unsteady world. The postmodernists supposed that the central feature of modernity was its grand explanatory narratives. I offer that these narratives were only a byproduct of constant material and technological change. This change–this technological acceleration–was the true defining feature of the modern age. What, then, comes after modernity? A more static world.

This world will resemble the premodern systems of the distant past more than it resembles the modern system of the recent past. Our future does not look like a nostalgic vision of our parent’s world, or even a world that has been preserved at all in the past two centuries. Our future looks like the ancient world, a place misunderstood, poorly recorded, and often denigrated. Our economic, political, and social institutions must adapt to a world without the constant, stable growth they are built upon. Our culture must adjust to the more mythic rhythms and splintered subjectivity of the ancient world. Most of all our minds must give up the illusions of modernity, with its promise of infinite progress, while rejecting the vague nihilism of whatever we call “postmodernity.” Inevitably, we must cool down. We have been overheating.

You can think of the modern world as a “hot” place. It is dynamic, energetic, unstable. Premodern societies, as a rule, tended to be “cold” places: long-lived, enduring, stable. I draw these terms from the great science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote a far-seeing piece back in 1982 called (take a breath) “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be.” She contrasts the “cool” world of pre-Columbian California, the California before colonization and industrialization, with the Golden State as it existed in the 1980s, the “hot” world of freeways, canals, and bridges. She herself takes the ideas of “hot” and “cold” societies from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who says that, in hot societies, “differentiations between castes and between classes are urged without cease, in order that social change and energy may be extracted from them.” Modernity was hot. What, then, is postmodernity? Ironically, given our literally warming planet, postmodernity is society’s great cooling-off.

Taking the temperature of media

Across the spectrum, we already see our world cooling off as the age of infinite growth slips away. Populations across the developed world have started to naturally decline; our infinitely productive capitalist system transitions into technofeudalism; productivity dips as science reaches points of diminishing returns. But future essays will discuss the changes in our material world: the hard facts of technology and economics. Postmodernity refers more to a mental state than a material one. For now, let's talk about our minds–and specifically about media.

When I refer to the “postmodern mind,” I really refer to the shared subjectivity of people in a connected society. Shared subjectivity is constructed by media. The term itself is self-explanatory: there is a medium of shared information between people. Without media to transmit information, groups of people cannot communicate shared ideas or agree on common myths, institutions, and practices. The differences between the modern and postmodern mind, then, are marked by their different media (whether or not that media actually creates the difference, or if it is a reflection of some upstream change). We can best understand our changing subjectivity by analyzing the media that constructs that subjectivity.

The obvious place to start understanding media is, of course, Understanding Media (1964). This classic text launched media theorist Marshall McLuhan to a kind of breakout popularity in his time that we don't really see with intellectuals today. He appeared in everything from Life to Esquire to Harper’s; he had an interview published in Playboy; he hosted a “McLuhan festival” in San Francisco in 1965 with advertising executives. A lot of people probably know him more from his awesome cameo in Annie Hall rather than his actual books. McLuhan never let the stuffy conventions of the academy limit himself: his writing style is contradictory, koan-like, and overall very 60s. This is, after all, the man who (according to Timothy Leary) coined the psychedelic motto, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Nowhere does he display this obscurantist tendency more than with one of his most controversial concepts: “hot” and “cold” media.

Annie Hall (1977)-when media theorists were rockstars

In Understanding Media McLuhan extends Levi-Strauss’s anthropological usage of “hot” and “cold” to classify media. People have argued about the meaning of these terms ever since. McLuhan defines these terms very loosely, with a Freud-like gift for smuggling remarkably obscure and unverifiable claims into his theories. A typical sentence reads: “we live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.” Another great McLuhanism: “the principle that distinguishes hot and cold media is perfectly embodied in the folk wisdom: ‘men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’” You can just see this guy palling around with Timothy Leary. I’ll do my best to explain his usage of the terms more or less faithfully, but half the point of reading McLuhan is reinterpreting him.

McLuhan drew the distinction between hot and cold media in terms of how much participation it invites from the consumer. From Understanding Media: “hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.” Hot media provide involvement without much stimulus: it extends “one single sense in ‘high definition.’” Examples would be books, radio, and film: books use the single sense of sight, while radio uses the single sense of hearing. Films use both. McLuhan classified television at the time as cool because it was "low-definition," compared to the high-quality image of movies projected in a theater. Television now, viewed in 4K on a home TV, should definitely be classified as hot–although, given that it is often viewed alone, must be seen as cooler than a film viewed in a theater. There is no interaction in “hot” media: one source speaks out with authority to many listeners. Cold media requires more engagement; it is a more participatory, attentive type of media. The original example of “cold” media is, of course, face-to-face conversation. You cannot talk back to a book and make it change its argument, but you can do exactly this in dialogue.

But I want to extend an understanding of hot and cold media past mere participation to take in their sociological functions. Hot media requires less participation, but is also more reproducible. It allows for a single viewpoint to be perfectly replicated: without participation from an audience, the message is exactly the same to everyone who interacts with it. When you print a book, everyone who reads it reads the exact same words you wrote. Hot media is the ideal medium for messages from the top to be spread among the masses. Cold media, on the other hand, is not highly reproducible: it may change in response to participation. Oral traditions, for example, are known for mutating over time, keeping only certain key mythical elements in common. Cold media clearly faces limitations when organizing large groups of people because it is slow, participatory, and constantly changing. Hot media turned out to be the key tool that modernity used to organize its institutions: not only is the medium the message, but the society is the medium.

For most of human history, people lived in small groups and subsisted almost entirely on “cold” media. It is no surprise that many date modernity as beginning with Gutenberg’s printing press. Before railroads, telegraphs, and textile factories, the change from cold to hot media marked our true societal transition into the modern age. The book is the canonical example of a “hot media”. It ushered in modernity, and the literacy campaigns of the 1800s and 1900s would bring millions of people into the fold of modern subjectivity for the first time. “Hot” media peaked in the mid-twentieth century with radio, television, and film, which were even more effective forms of top-down media than books, pamphlets, newspapers, and other printed media. These were truly “high-definition” media formats, hijacking the senses to speak directly to the subconscious. Not all technologies of the era produced hot media, though. McLuhan refers to the telephone specifically as a cool medium. Indeed, the 20th century, the era that ended modernity, did introduce a number of cooler technologies that broke down the carefully curated shared truth of modernity. The greatest new form of cold media would come after Understanding Media was released in 1964. That is, of course, the Internet.

Computers introduce a participatory nature that inherently cools off the media they host. Forums and messaging services, the first communication formats on the Internet, essentially reproduce dialogue, a typically cool medium, in text form. Most social media is fairly cool as well. Peer-oriented services like Facebook are quite cool, though somewhat warmer than messaging services, and “follower-based” networks like Instagram and TikTok are warmer still. The great exception to this general online “cool” trend is Twitter, a very hot form of media indeed, and for this reason it is the favored social media of the powerful: governments, corporations, and celebrities. Yet even Twitter involves back-and-forth communication: unlike the traditional proclamation posted in the town square, users can openly respond on Twitter to the pronouncements of powerful accounts. Of course, no media could be cooler than the new large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT, generating tailor-made text to reproduce conversation. In generative AI, we come full circle back to fully participatory media: dialogue with machines instead of people.

The participation element of computer media shapes the entire user experience. Sitting on your phone scrolling TikTok does not require much participation, so it may appear very “hot”, but your interaction with the algorithms that control your feed introduce a “coolness” to this media completely different from the experience of reading a book or watching a TV show. A book cannot change based on who is reading it; its reproducibility is absolute. Social media, on the other hand, always involves participation: even if you don’t actively post, your recorded activity shapes what you see. Tech platforms have introduced so many metrics to track your attention that just lingering for a bit longer on a certain video counts as participation. The top-down hot media of modernity only speaks; the cooler media of postmodernity listens, even if only to change its argument to be more personally appealing to you.

Computers were just emerging as McLuhan did his work, and the potential was obvious even back in the 60s. The 60s were, after all, a great time for technological predictions that still haven’t come true: we were promised HAL 9000, moon colonies, and psychedelic space babies by 2001, when instead we got blogs, Islamic terrorism, and Shrek. (Here I must attach an essay on Shrek as a postmodern take on fairy tales, which it is.) But McLuhan saw the future more clearly than most. In Understanding Media, he predicted that computers would lead a return to “cold” media. Sociologically, he predicted that this new technology would shape the entire world into a “global village”, saying: “after three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has become compressional by dramatic reversal. As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.”

Here we see an intimation of the ancient future: our new media returning us to the distant past. McLuhan was not the first to recognize this. As far back as 1933, the linguist Edward Sapir noted that “the multiplication of far-reaching techniques of communication…increases the sheer radius of communication, so that for certain purposes the whole civilized world is made the psychological equivalent of a primitive tribe." But it would take the rise of the Internet in the 1990s for the term “global village” to really catch on. Most people focused on the “global” part rather than the “village” part. Hurried cityfolk might think of a village as a peaceful, pastoral place, but they tend to be pretty fractious. They certainly don’t function seamlessly as part of some larger political body: tribes don’t get along well with other tribes. McLuhan thought we would be retribalized because the global village basically ensures maximum friction and disagreement. In 1969 McLuhan argued that “the global village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions; the global village is far more diverse.” Once the initial utopian euphoria of the Internet wore off, this stark new reality became very clear. The Internet, it seems, is dissolving our civil society.

Noam Chomsky in the heart of the media lion’s den

Accustomed to a political and cultural system centered around hot media, we react to the new cold media with alarm. Thinkers from traditional forms of hot media (writers for newspapers, academics, television personalities) sound the alarm about heavily personalized online “realities” that curate content to the individual. This, they warn, causes a breakdown of shared truth: a “post-truth” society. But I question whether shared truth–or rather, mass truth–deserves to be an ideal to strive for. For most of human history, isolated societies lived in entirely different epistemological realities from their neighbors. The very idea of a “shared truth” is a modernist fantasy made possible only by top-down, “hot” media. The more eminent the publication, the more they bemoan their lost power–the New York Times looks back in longing to the days when it really did form the only source of truth for millions of people. 1950s America is often cited as a highpoint of consensus and shared truth, when everyone trusted good old Walter Cronkite. Convenient that at that time, a vast yet curiously homogeneous nation shared just three TV channels. All of those networks back then also shared the same basic ideology: patriotic, anti-Communist, pro-corporate, gently patriarchal, assiduously “moderate.” Noam Chomsky describes the process of calibrating a specific worldview between different news outlets brilliantly in Manipulating Consent (1988). Never before or since has hot media united so many people behind the exact same opinions. Shared truth is just another term for shared propaganda.

Information media, especially social media, is actually causing a return to older ways of interaction and socialization. Take a recent panic: the role of AI and literacy. Students now widely use LLMs for reading class material and writing essays. Video content on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube has overtaken written content in popularity. Literacy rates are already suffering. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the US Department of Education, has shown that just 43% of fourth graders in the US scored at or above a proficient level in reading in 2024. This figure has declined every year since 2019. Adult literacy rates have fallen too; the percentage of adults with low literacy rates grew from 19% in 2017 to 28% in 2023. It is not difficult to imagine a near future where most of the population listens and watches instead of reading and writing, relying on AI to fill in the literacy gap.

A mass society that is largely illiterate? Nothing could be more traditional. After all, mass literacy was unknown before modernity, and educating the masses to read was one of the key sociological projects that created modern subjects. Our world went from a place of people talking and listening, to one of them reading and writing–and now we return to talking and listening. AI may usher in a post-literacy era, fit for a postmodern society, where reading becomes the niche subject of specialists that it was before mass-produced books and industrialized education. We may not have knights in the ancient future, but we will probably have secular monks (if we already don’t). The main difference is that proximity is no longer required for shared realities, as it was in premodernity: someone can share media with someone on the other side of the world, while living in a different shared reality than their physical neighbor. Yet the effect is the same: media is cooling off.

As media cools off, culture cools off with it. Mass culture is a consequence of mass media, so it is no surprise that shared culture grows weaker as we splinter into ever smaller and more diverse subgroups online. The mass culture of the 50s and 60s and its counterpoint, the counterculture, both relied on those same three TV networks conditioning millions of people to think, act, and look the same. As cold media replaces hot media, the old interaction form of the village replaces the top-down command system of the industrial age. For example, the online phenomenon of cancel culture, far from being unique to the Internet, functions as a contemporary version of the complex systems of public shaming and social enforcement that kept order in small villages. Just as villages tended to resist top-down modern centralization, the tiny echo chambers of the Internet prevent the formation of the large cultural movements that once united large nation-states.

Nationalism: the true opiate of the masses

But media does not just function as a way to share culture and ideas: it lies at the heart of the organization of a society. The ambitious, centralized political institutions of modernity would have never been possible without the top-down, “hot” media of printed books. Large numbers of people could never have been organized into nation-states or mass democracies without hot media creating a shared reality for them to believe in. Historian Benedict Anderson asserted that nations are socially constructed in his book Imagined Communities (1983), and connected nationalism with what he called “print capitalism.” For a nation, reading the daily paper (a classic “hot medium”) acted as a “mass ceremony” to create this imagined community. The American Revolution was kindled by pamphlets such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, coordinated by written proclamations in colonial legislatures, and sealed by a written code of laws: the Constitution. The French Revolution, too, sustained itself through media: the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the radical tabloids of Murat, and the war propaganda of General Bonaparte, the man whose pamphlets built the myth of the invincible Emperor Napoleon. From Poland to India, nationalist movements for independence often began with revivals in national culture through media like literature, theater, and folk music.

Media coordinated the Scientific Revolution: a community of literate scientists sprang up around Europe, spreading new developments through written form. Religious ideas spread rapidly too: the printing press played a huge role in the Reformation a few generations later. McLuhan notes, “The hotting-up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.” But it was not the content of these books, pamphlets, and newspapers that produced these revolutions. If McLuhan was right that “the medium is the message,” then it was the very form of written media itself–the ability to convey reproducible, “high definition” data to many people at once–that proved so destabilizing and ultimately modern.

The Athenian theater, as imagined by modernists

Command and coordination prove just as impossible with too much communication as with too little. Premodern cultures resemble a small Athenian theater, just large enough for a group of people to listen to the voice of a single person. With modernity came huge increases in populations: suddenly arenas could fit tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people. But improved tools such as loudspeakers gave those in command the ability to speak directly to these massive crowds–and by speaking to them, unify them and lead them. The modern crowd reached a sort of apotheosis in mid-century dictatorships: witness the huge throngs seen in The Triumph of the Will or in Soviet military parades, where hundreds of thousands of people march as one. The media of postmodernity has given every single person in a crowd a loudspeaker. A noisy arena full of people with loudspeakers cannot be governed any more than that same arena with weak human voices can. The new media has caused us to revert to the old state of chaos. In the words of Hungarian philosopher Laszlo Foldenyi, modernity “was so variegated that the world itself seemed endless. The many different kinds of voice create the impression of an opera. Today, however, everything has contracted to such a degree that this dialogue is frequently rendered illusory, no matter how painful its absence may be. Instead of the rich strains of an opera, only an aria can be heard from the cacophony.”

That postmodern cacophony results in effectively the same kinds of subjectivities and institutions as the premodern arena. Cold media goes hand in hand with cold societies. In this way our cold Internet media reflects a society retreating from the “hotness” of modernity and towards the “coldness” of the ancient past. Instead of relying on the last few centuries of modernity to predict what will come, look to the cold societies of the deep past to see what our cold future might resemble.

Cold antiquity and hot modernity

In the West, however, we have forgotten what a cold society looks like. Our inability to see the future stems from our inability to understand the distant past. Anything from the premodern era gets remembered in some sort of vague haze: the “Dark Ages” in Europe, and prehistory in the rest of the world. (Non-Western countries like China, Japan, and India, on the other hand, often remember their premodern history rather well, as a golden age before the white men came from overseas to subjugate their countries.) We may engage in a bit of wistful noble savagery regarding premodern people, but we always condescend to them: they are never considered equals. We look at them as basically powerless, superstitious children.

Ever since the Renaissance, Europeans have denigrated their ancestors who lived before the Renaissance, basically portraying them as religious fanatics or easily impressed sheep, unable to use reason to see the truth of the world, duped by the opium of the masses. Yet it was the modern man, living within enormous countries of millions of people, bombarded on all sides by propaganda, serving huge systems of state and corporate power, who truly lived a life of conformist fanaticism. (Also, with all due respect to Marx, premodern peoples actually didn’t have opium, or really any drugs other than alcohol. Modernity invented all the cool mind-numbing drugs that we like so much.) McLuhan noted, “Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies.”

Premodern states exercised far less power over their subjects than modern, centralized states did. These states tended to change often. In many cases average people might not even know who was their technical “ruler.” Sometimes the state of power was so obscure that even high-ranking people would not know the true state of affairs. It was commonplace for centuries in medieval Japan, for instance, for powerful shoguns and warlords to maintain a polite fiction that the emperor actually ruled over them, even if the emperor was just a puppet. Elaborate courtly rituals would maintain this fiction: bow before the emperor, say a few little poems, and then go have your closed-door meetings where actual decisions are made. Who believed this? Perhaps some local people did. Most likely, though, they wouldn’t care. Why would they? Emperor, shogun, whoever: they would never come to their village. Without electronic communication, they would never hear their voice or see their face. At best, they might hear some proclamation read aloud in the square (although they couldn’t be sure that this was not forged, or somehow modified by their local lord).

Peasants, displayed lacking class consciousness

Peasants throughout history have often deceived their rulers with great shows of obedience, while carrying on their lives fairly independently. Dismiss peasants as stupid and superstitious if you want, but they have long proved quite sly at winning autonomy from centralizing governments. For this reason, ruling classes in premodern societies tended to dismiss peasants as impossible to control. Revolutionaries despaired too: when Marx said peasants lacked “class consciousness,” he was referring to the fact that they were difficult to organize and direct within a party. It was the bourgeois man of modernity who read books, sang national anthems, and believed in ideals, who would work tirelessly on behalf of elites. They would fill the ranks of citizen armies; they would diligently labor on behalf of their bosses; they would obediently vote as their political party instructed.

Modernity needed an ever-expanding base of human beings, raw materials, land, and markets to keep heating up. As it did, it shook people loose from their old world-systems. It promised to swap superstition for liberation. All old traditions had to be cast as restrictive, rigid, and simplistic. Traditions controlled the outward shapes of the lives of premodern people to a great degree. Yet these seemingly fixed traditions conceal a great degree of chaos within their worldviews. Most premodern peoples, for instance, believed that the world teemed with a huge variety of gods, spirits, demons, and angels that lurked all around them. How could a pagan Greek really believe in a “stable world” when it was widely accepted that a capricious deity might choose them for torment at any moment? Monotheism may have tamed the spiritual world somewhat, but medieval Christians retained beliefs in saints, demons, and spirits. The seeming “stability” of life on a historical scale conceals the great daily fears people held of an inscrutable, treacherous world. Death formed a constant part of life in societies where a majority of infants would die in their first year of life, and people would try all kinds of traditions–prayer, confession, sacrifice–in vain attempts to appease the gods. None of these traditions, though, could ever truly protect someone. Someone might think they have done everything right, and still somehow offend a powerful god. While religion provided a general sense of existential meaning, it was often no defense against the travails of everyday life. Fate, destiny, God’s plan: these might exist, but they were unknowable by humans.

The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind (1825)-William Blake

In the Biblical story of Job, God’s favorite servant is “blameless and upright,” yet Job was still punished brutally. Why? God and Satan made a bet. Yes, all-powerful God treats his favorite human like a racehorse. Justifiably, Job asks God why he has been punished: God answers, “Where were you when I laid the Earth’s foundation?” God even implies that he punishes Job simply because he can: “Do you have an arm like God’s, and can your voice thunder like his? Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor, and clothe yourself in honor and majesty. Unleash the fury of your wrath, look at all who are proud and humble them.” The modern man might rage at this answer. Job meekly replies, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand.” This answer was canonized in the Hebrew Bible as the authoritative response to man’s questioning of a higher power. This sort of helplessness was the rule in the ontologies of the ancient world. The Greeks, too, believed in hubris: the punishment of the Gods for excessive pride, a reminder that human beings are playthings in the hands of more powerful beings. In Euripides’ play The Bacchae, the Chorus sings of the proud Pentheus: “in the delusion of his wits, he thinks his violence can master the Invincible. But there is One ready and willing to correct his heresies–Death.” The Greeks, like other premodern cultures, never held the overweening assurance of the modern man. Lost in a frightening world they could not explain, premodern peoples felt the same confusion and obscurity that marks postmodern subjectivity.

Modernity gave its citizens explanations amidst the swirling chaos of life. We do not have superstition anymore, they said. We have science. True: science undergirded the great confidence of modernity. It is ironic that science, given its explicit method of epistemological humility, would give its adherents more confidence than traditional believers. But the traditional believers, despite their unshakable beliefs in religion, thought of their knowledge as fixed: that which is unknown, such as the nature of God, remains forever unknown. Their beliefs are, like the traditional society, stable. Science, on the other hand, is engaged in a project of perpetual expansion: empirical knowledge is added onto an ever-growing edifice. While much may be currently unknown, it will not always stay that way. Future generations will know much more than us: at some point they may know everything. Projection to this confident, omniscient future becomes a favorite pastime in modernity: stability can only be imagined once everything is known. To fall short of omniscience–to live, as we postmodern subjects do, painfully aware of the same unsolvable antinomies that tormented our ancestors–appears to be a failure.

Just look at the unshakable confidence displayed by the “science-believers” during the COVID pandemic. Every new pronouncement from public health agencies–no matter how much it contradicted previous orders, and no matter how many qualifications the scientists gave–was met with uncritical devotion from a certain mass of the public. It was assumed that COVID would be eventually understood and cured; that public health tools such as quarantines, social distancing, and masks would tame the disease; and that eventually vaccines would completely defeat the virus itself. To suggest that the pandemic would be ended by old-fashioned “herd immunity” (that is, the way all pandemics throughout history have always ended) was taken as a defeat. That the pandemic did eventually end this way proved deeply troubling to many. To some, in the “zero-COVID community,” that fact remains unacceptable, 5 years later. To these people, there cannot be variations that pop up without warning; there cannot be surges that rise and fall seemingly at random; there cannot be vaccines that are not always effective. These people wait, full of faith that science’s war against COVID is still ongoing, and that full victory will eventually come.

Of course, that same pandemic converted many back to traditional views of medicine. A permanent disillusionment in public health and Western medicine is one of the enduring legacies of COVID. Talk to someone who feels betrayed by the WHO, the CDC, pharmaceutical companies, and the medical industry, and you will find a mindset of someone returning to the premodern view of the human body and illness. While cloaked in different language, the subjectivity of the postmodern mind is unmistakably ancient–a fact which most postmodern scholars either don’t understand or willfully hide.

Great book

If premodern beliefs are simplified to the point of stupidity in order to conceal their sophistication, then postmodern beliefs are obscured to the point of confusion. Even eminent scholars of postmodernism cannot quite say what “postmodernism” means. At best we say that none of us have beliefs or traditions anymore. This is a truly brilliant piece of propaganda: it is as if someone believed the air they breathe is just empty space. This misconception comes about because all the old traditions of individual societies have indeed lost meaning for postmodern subjects. But human societies cannot exist without organizing principles, and our global society has many. Most of all, we believe in capitalism. Mark Fisher coined the term “capitalist realism,” meaning we cannot imagine a world without capitalism. Indeed, at this point a single subjectivity has spread around the entire world, and it lacks serious opponents. Everyone in the world wears similar clothes, enjoys similar content on smartphones, and at least pays lip service to similar political ideals. (Just three states in the entire world lack a written constitution: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and San Marino.)

The postmodern subject does have a single worldview. Everyone on Earth shares it. What does this resemble? The premodern society. In ancient times, a single worldview was shared by everyone in a single society. In today’s postmodern times, a single worldview is shared by everyone in the entire world. Modernity was the outlier: it featured several different worldviews jostling for space. Politically, intellectually, culturally, there were choices. In both the premodern world and postmodern world, there are no choices left. The term “global village” was used by McLuhan to refer to our postmodern world, and the phrase is indeed telling. The world feels smaller because we literally live in a single village. With all our technology and power, we feel like villagers of old.

You may argue that no one really believes in capitalism, or in the globalized society that has engulfed the Earth. The premodern mind actually believed in their traditions, their gods, and their magic: we must be different because the postmodern mind doesn’t believe in capitalism. Again, this betrays a modernist perspective: the idea that one must believe in an idea that creates progress and change. One only needs to believe that there is a single world, that it is inevitable, and that it cannot be changed for a worldview to find currency. Indeed, in most premodern societies people did not believe anything could be done by humans to make progress or change history. Some believed that the world was ultimately cyclical. Others believed that one day God would purify the Earth. In any case, the matter was out of human hands. We can never know what kind of doubts premodern peoples held in God’s plan: most of them couldn’t or didn’t write down these thoughts. Society needed everyone to merely accept that reality was decreed by God, and to live their lives accordingly.

Similarly, whether you dislike capitalism or not, most of us accept that capitalism controls our reality. Money has the same force today as God’s will, or gravity. We worship money because it is the only force left really worth being worshipped. Capitalism, as always, has answered the call to become a kind of all-encompassing tradition fit for the global village. American Christianity, for instance, has explicitly begun to incorporate capitalist teachings into its liturgy to literally make The Market into an object of religious veneration. In culture, nostalgia fulfills the same role of traditional culture, with the spin that nostalgia can cycle through different time periods to give us the stimulation we need that premodern villagers lacked. No tourist is going to be touring a Chipotle anytime soon to see an example of rich capitalist realism culture, but that only speaks to how vibrant (aka "living") it is. As capitalist culture entrenches itself, it approaches the all-controlling heights that tradition once held: our minds are just as transfixed by the contours of capitalist culture as the premodern mind was transfixed by their own religion. Capitalist realism begets a premodern subjectivity.

A better word for the future than “postmodern”

The new world will, in the beginning, look a lot like modernity. Although it would make a cool fantasy novel, the future will probably never look like the premodern world. But it will feel like premodernity to us. If the term “postmodern” still brings up too many memories of pretentious art galleries, call this future “neoarchaic.” The uncertainty and confusion we recognize as “postmodern” represents a long return to the ancient human condition. Cold media will create an idiosyncratic, post-rational umbrella of beliefs under a larger, central tradition of globalized capitalist realism. In this way the premodern and neoarchaic (or postmodern) subjectivities–the felt experience of living through these times–will merge. Subjectivity, though, must interact with material reality: with new media technologies, new economic conditions, and new social changes. The essential similarities between postmodernity and premodernity come down to a shared sense of stability.

Human beings quickly get used to anything. In any time, in any place, we regard the world we are born into as natural and perfectly obvious. What we feel emotionally is change. We feel happy when our life seems to improve; we feel sad when our life seems to decline. No matter how amazing our situation may be, we grow accustomed to it, and start to judge it by how it changes. Even if we do reach a utopian future of plenty, we will judge it emotionally by the changes that take place during our life. And postmodernity, like premodernity, will feel more stable–for better or for worse.

Modernity was an unsettling place. It could only sustain itself by promising ever more change: otherwise people would never accept the changes it had already wrought. Marx famously said in the Communist Manifesto that “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

But people learned to find a sort of stability in this instability. The only way to make it through the massive changes was to buckle down and hope that even more changes might come to alleviate the pain. For a time they did. The innovation of social democracy eased the blow of capitalism. The innovations of technology made life easier and more convenient, even if it became more uncertain and precarious. Modernity was delivering the goods: people accepted the loss of their village elders in exchange for clean water. The grandchildren of coal miners lived in neat houses in the suburbs.

The world that modernity promised

Now we have built our entire society on a sort of controlled instability: if we deviate from the path of infinite growth even slightly, then our credit-supported economic Ponzi scheme comes crashing down. Everything from suburbs to Social Security to fiat money are based on a strangely conservative, unchanging world where the economy grows 3% a year, inflation grows 2% a year, and the population grows 1% per year in perpetuity. These are all relics of the modernist era of constant change. Grow or die: that is the slogan. That is why we can never rest, never slow down, never enjoy anything: we are birds flying frantically over the ocean, with nowhere safe and solid to touch down.

Ironically then, when everyone assumes that things must keep growing and changing forever, a lack of “change” will itself mark a huge change. We are so dependent on change that simply adapting to a lack of change will be downright revolutionary. It will be a long, painful process as the old institutions of modernity die and we return to echoes of older ways. Even those who profess to prefer the old ways have no idea how to cope. Conservatives are just as ill-suited for this neoarchaic process as liberals are, because most of them want to just “conserve” their preferred version of modernity. No conservatives outside the Taliban are advocating publicly for some sort of premodern society. It’s not exactly a winning approach for votes in a Western country. Just because human beings used to live in a premodern way hundreds of years ago is not that relevant to generations today who have no historical memory whatsoever of a feudal world where the written word is irrelevant and political boundaries are fluid and constantly changing. All the power in our world has oriented itself towards what it calls progress: economic progress, social progress, historical progress. Just as outdated feudal monarchies refused to change even as modernity rose up within their borders, our own institutions have yet to adapt to the changing reality of postmodernity.

Modernity found a sort of stability in instability. When you are driving fast with no brakes, any sort of speed bump feels dangerous. Now, our institutions are becoming unstable as the world becomes more stable. Social democracies face economic devastation as their populations stabilize and stop growing. The world faced wars in the 20th century as colonial empires and communist regimes broke apart, unable to survive if they did not expand. It is not the End of History where we will find peace. That process will likely involve civil wars, social upheaval, and new economic systems. The End of History was the inflection point, marking a change in direction. It marks the point where society begins to cool down.

If this change will prove painful in the short term, that is only because our institutions are too powerful and self-interested to adapt peacefully. Humans can adapt to any future, so long as it does not surprise them. Premodern peoples lived in conditions that we today would consider extreme poverty and ignorance, yet there is no evidence they were any less happy or fulfilled than modern people. As for the future, we do not know if, by our standards, it will look like a utopia or a dystopia. The only thing we can be certain of is that those people living in that future will not think of it as either. It will simply be the world to them.

Second childhood and the achievable utopia

If history mirrors a human lifespan, then premodernity was our long childhood. In that time we exerted little power in the world. We could build homes but not control heat; we could grow crops, but not control rain. People conjured up silly-sounding beliefs and simplified misconceptions about how things work. Yet there was also a sense of energy and enthusiasm. If we had dreams about the future, they seem far-off and abstract. We focused instead on the day-to-day task of living. Modernity was mankind’s stormy adolescence, where we went out confidently to test the limits of our powers. We zigged and zagged, adopting new belief systems and identities. Modern people made all sorts of grandiose plans for the future, and arrogantly looked down on their childhood past, believing, like haughty teenagers, that now they had all the answers. As historian Will Durant said, “perhaps our Western systems, so confident that 'knowledge is power', are the voices of a once lusty youth exaggerating human ability and tenure." This postmodern moment of the last 60 years or so is humanity’s midlife crisis. The dreams we once had seem unachievable: we cannot believe that, after all our work, we have ended up here. We fall into despair about the future.

The Seven Ages of Man (1838)-William Mulready

Old age is a time of limited dreams. It is a time where people accept the world as it is. Yet this breeds contentment: free from the unrealistic fantasies of youth, they can once again enjoy the present, as they did when they were children. For in old age we once again resemble our original selves, our childhood selves. It is ancient wisdom that old age is, as Shakespeare said, a “second childishness.” So the human race will return to its ancient childhood with the wisdom of age. Not for nothing that Nietzsche predicted the final stage of human evolution to resemble childhood: “innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes." A future which resembles the past may prove to be the only form of future worth looking forward to.

An ancient future may sound bleak: premodern superstition without cool village dances or handmade suits of armor. The horrors of modernity without any of the hope. This is because we are still accustomed to the modernist propaganda of progress: anything less than the technological solution of unsolvable human contradictions looks like failure. If we don’t achieve the Singularity, or fully automated luxury communism, or the intergalactic liberal federation of Star Trek, then we can only imagine dystopian ruin. Frederic Jameson, of course, said it best: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Ursula K. Le Guin smiling as she imagines a better world

In that same brilliant essay I quoted earlier, Ursula K. Le Guin recognized this failure of imagination, declaring: “It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth.” The modernist world of growth and progress is the only future we’ve been taught to imagine. We can only describe our postmodernist world by what it is not: not growing, not changing, not modern. No wonder we are disappointed.

Le Guin takes the concept of “hot” and “cold” societies further, finding in them deeper oppositions: straight vs curved, masculine vs feminine, and ultimately yin vs yang. In her eyes, modernity has lost itself entirely in yang. In her words: “Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot. Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.” Now that our society seems to be cooling off, we anticipate some distant reversal: an apocalyptic end to the changes of modernity. World War III, the Singularity, climate disaster, the zombie apocalypse, the world-ending pandemic. We imagine any sort of return to the past must be catastrophic.

Le Guin thought differently. She rejected the sleek, inhuman utopias of socialism or technofuturism or capitalist realism. She advocated for an organic future: “I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways; because we’re in a rational dilemma, an either/or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality, and neither the either nor the or is a place where people can live.” If our world cools down, and our civilization slows down, then that dominating line of “progress” can curve back around, and give us time to put life back into balance. This is the cool future that can give us space to live.

Some do not want us to slow down. We are held under the yoke of powerful institutions who refuse to accept that their dreams of limitless disruption and unending control might come to an end. So long as they try to cancel the ancient future, we will be imprisoned in an endless, nightmarish present. But the very technology that gave them power also undermines the propagandistic hold they have over our huge, teeming, complex societies. The cracks have already begun to form in the control systems they have erected, as mass belief fractures into the consciousness of the village. Perhaps we will find freedom in the cold.

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Coming soon

noreply@example.com (Samuel R. Holladay) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is Our Ancient Future.

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