Post #13: Upgrading Civilization
Post #13: Upgrading Civilization
These writings have been trending towards this question: “what is running human civilization?”
In the last post I proposed that our civilization has an informal “operating system,” analogous to a computer’s OS, that dictates our actions. We’ll call this “civilizational operating system” COS for short.
I’m going to use this post to further explore a definition of this COS and then consider what the next COS upgrade could be.
How Is Our COS Designed?
We’ll call the current COS version 2.13 to represent the second millennia, first century, third decade.
So how do we build a model for what v2.13 looks like?
As we established in last week’s post, our COS has experienced multiple upgrades over the millennia. To briefly recap this evolution: complex spiritual explanations and customs came before complex governance mechanics and both came before complex economies. Point being, these different elements or features of our COS were added sequentially, similar to how a computer’s operating system gains complexity over time. We built religion, then pushed a government upgrade, then pushed an economy upgrade.
Seeing that our COS has gone through a series of upgrades shows that there is something to add upgrades to. Said differently, our civilization has coordinating elements that have been there for thousands of years- like religion, government, and economies. That means humans born 1,000 years apart are leveraging the same civilizational operating system. What does this system look like?
Let’s take a look.
The below image shows each layer we’ve currently built of our civilization’s operating system along with the components that make up each layer. Keep in mind that this image is a modest start at representing our COS architecture, primarily meant to provide a place to start the exploration. With more work and resources I believe we’ll be able to represent our COS with high accuracy.
In the architecture image, you’ll notice I bucketed the major COS features- including religion, government, and economy- into three layers. The “understanding layer” being the original COS function, followed by coordination, and then cooperation. I included a “next layer” placeholder to demonstrate that we may not be done adding layers to our COS.
What Types of COS Upgrades Happen?
Now that we can imagine what this COS might look like, let’s see what kinds of upgrades are even possible. Then we can consider how we should upgrade it.
The first and arguably most major upgrade that can happen is a new layer. For example, when early humans learned to think symbolically and represent their reality by manipulating those symbols, it created the civilizational function of understanding our existence. So a “layer addition” is one upgrade type.
Beyond adding an entirely new layer, upgrades also happen by adding a component to an existing layer.
For example, within the “understanding layer” there’s the component of religion. And religion has been “upgrading” into the component called science over the past 500 years. That upgrade is still in progress.
To note, a component upgrade like science doesn’t render the previous component obsolete. To the contrary, religion and the baton of existential understanding that it has carried for millennia is simply getting handed off to science to continue the race. The same function is being carried out.
And then each component undergoes its own upgrade process. Here’s a rough look at the evolution of the government component. We’ve trended away from autocratic and dictatorial forms of leadership towards more self-leadership strategies like democracy.
Then each sub-component of government, such democracy, goes through its own upgrade process as well, with different flavors of democracy evolving over time. I’ll trust that you get the idea and I won’t make a picture of a sub-component evolution :).
Like a computer’s operating system, the entire COS architecture is interconnected with each upgrade relying on parts of the previous version to function. Without the understanding layer, the coordination and cooperation layers would lack context. And without the coordination benefit of government, the economy upgrade would likely have failed. Much like a multilayer cake, each layer of our COS relies on the preceding one.
What’s the Next Upgrade?
There’s more writing and research to do before I’ll feel confident to give a detailed proposal as to which upgrade[s] v2.14 might entail. Keep in mind that once a precise “upgrade proposal” is made, this substack will be nearing the end of its journey since the high-level goal of these writings is to select what to start building.
For now, what I can do is describe some hunches as to the nature of the next upgrade[s]. There are two areas of interest at the moment:
Transparent & upgradeable COS: increasing our collective self-awareness and agency by making our COS transparent and upgradeable
Post-economic incentive system: rely on a system to influence our decisions that is based on a more meaningful metric than dollars
To look at the first hunch, a transparent & upgradeable COS would mean that we have full awareness as to what is running human civilization, similar to how we’re aware of the OS that runs our computers. As it currently stands, we have no way to answer the question: “is this COS working for us?” Not being able to confidently answer that question is a scary reality. It means that the trajectory of human civilization, and of our lives as individuals, could be going off the rails for all we know.
To borrow the computer operating system metaphor from the last post, computers would be way less effective tools if we couldn’t monitor the OS. “Performance monitoring of operating systems and processes is essential to debug processes and systems, effectively manage system resources, making system decisions, and evaluating and examining systems.” I pulled that sentence from this overview of operating system monitoring tools. No need to dig through it, but give it a quick scroll to appreciate the rigor with which we monitor a computer’s OS. We should apply at least a similar rigor to monitoring the OS of civilization.
In The Society Brain post, there’s this line that says, “We need to develop a societal self-awareness that enables us to understand what makes our society tick.”
The next major upgrade to our OS will include a mechanism for collective self-awareness. This upgrade, whether it represents an entirely new layer or a layer-component or some other part, will help our species know the direction we are heading. And for the individual, it will enable each person to automatically know how they fit into the greater whole.
To look at the second hunch, I use the term “post-economic” to describe a near-future version of our civilization where the main influence on our decision-making isn’t what we currently know as the economy. Right now and for the past ~500 years, the economy has been the hottest civilizational trend, capturing our attention and directing our energy more than any other feature of our COS. This economy feature has had a good run, but we can now see room for improvement.
Leveraging modern tools, primarily the internet (+web3) & AI, we can build a system that does a better job than our economy at selecting valuable activities and pushing us to complete them. As our civilization has matured, we’ve gained the luxury of spending energy on non-mission critical tasks, i.e. tasks that don’t directly relate to sustaining life. On one hand this more mature state is great as it means we’ve stabilized our existence. On the other hand, we’ve confused this more stable state with the project of civilization being over.
We still have an epic journey ahead of us and we need an incentive system in place that appreciates that. The idea is that a post-economic “cooperation layer” would guide our civilization to the next stage of growth, whereas our current economic system is stalling us at this wonderful but incomplete stage.
Next Up
We’ll start to explore a post-economic system in detail.
The next post will spend most or all of its focus on which features this post-economic system should have. Then once we have a feature set more or less complete, we can look at how to leverage modern tools to bring those features to life.
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What’s this substack all about?
We need to upgrade our civilization’s operating system. This newsletter explores how our current operating system came to be, which improvements would be helpful, and how we can make an upgrade happen. This substack’s goal is to land on a project that can be built to upgrade our civilization’s operating system.
I chose to write this publicly to get feedback on these ideas. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. Upgrading our COS and building our future is a team effort.