Techno-Feudalism & the Post-Collapse Network Empire

We discuss how widespread economic collapse could lead to a "techno-feudal" future, with fortified city-states and regions controlled by technological elites. However, networks of these havens may help rebuild civilization. We compare to South Africa's current situation and emphasize why islands and unstable regions are poor choices. This builds on the concept of sovereign network states.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] what makes it a network empire instead of a network state. And I think the core, the, the core thing that Balaji when he came up with this concept and missed is the insecurity of a future world when we're dealing with wide scale economic collapse.

That is the world that we are heading into where it is cheaper. For the wealthy class in our society to isolate themselves from everyone else than it is for them to ensure widespread prosperity.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: I am so glad to be recording these again. Our audience doesn't know, but it's actually been like a week and a half since we did our last recording because we were at this ARC conference in the UK, which is supposed to be, I don't know, like this new alternative to Davos sort of a thing, but I think it's just really conservative British Davos.

But one of the people who we met while we were there and we had a long conversation with was Curtis Yarvin. And in that conversation, I really helped me clarify some [00:01:00] things that I think about what's going to happen in the future of our species. And we may release that conversation because it was recorded at some time, but it was recorded in, like, a busiest restaurant with a Greek reporter interviewing us both together.

So I can't believe that some random Greek newspaper, a monarchist newspaper, by the way, is getting the piece where it's me and you and Curtis Jarvin talking for, like, 2 hours. But, we constantly get accused of being techno feudalists in the media. And, this to me feels not just like an unfair accusation, but almost an insane accusation.

It's a bit like... If you know, I have some friends who their family were, you know, left Germany early, and they tried really hard to convince everyone the Holocaust was coming. And they were just basically told they were crazy, and so, this family is actually descended from a guy who broke into his girlfriend's house at night, took the girl he was dating, and ran away.

Now, they made the horrible mistake of running east [00:02:00] to Russia, instead of west and so then they... For like a 10 year period, just constantly had to flee new places. But anyway, it would be like calling him a, a Holocaustian. And people would be like, well, yeah, but even if he saw it coming, you know, they could have said, well, let's try to prevent it.

Right. And it's like, no, there was a certain point where he was like, look at. Hitler, this guy who was elected to power. Look at what he's writing. Read his book. Okay. He published this like it's not vague what his plans are. And you know, I feel a bit like that when I talk about techno feudalism, where I'm saying it is.

Almost inevitable at this point that something like a techno feudalistic state is going to happen. And we need to, those of us who do not want to be churned up by the system, need to prepare for how the world is going to change. Both in terms of our culture and our families and economically because it's [00:03:00] going to be absolutely catastrophic and very, very significant.

Now, 1st, I would say, when we talk about techno feudalism, we do not mean. So there's this, like, Greek economist guy who keeps he wrote, like, a book on quote, unquote, techno feudalism and the way that he defines the term is vague and pointless, basically what we already know, which is that we live in a world in which large tech companies control a lot of the economic system.

And it's like, yes, we know that. That's not what we talk about. When we talk about techno feudalism, we are talking about something that is much closer to literal feudalistic states. But before we go further, we need to talk a bit about. Where we think the overall economy is going before we can talk about the technophilic states, which are going to be major players within this future economy.

So this actually was a point that Curtis made in the conversation. And after hearing it, it really clarified a lot of how I think about things, [00:04:00] but it was in line with what I thought already.

It just gave me more. Picture as to what the future is going to look like. And he said,

didn't catch the future of the future of the Western world at least.

And the, the, the future, the future of the eastern world is also going to be bleak, but the way it will collapse is going to look very different. And we can get to that in different videos. But. The future of the Western world is going to look very similar to the current situation in South Africa.

aNd this has nothing to do with, with race or even the politics of the country. Right. What specifically we're talking about is the on the ground reality of what it feels like

Simone Collins: to live there. Yeah, well, it is what real collapse looks like. From a, we'll say a modern developed society. So what happens when the infrastructure has been built, when there's electricity, there's housing, there's communities, but then.

Things start falling apart. Infrastructure starts falling apart. Law enforcement starts, starts falling apart. And that's what collapse looks like [00:05:00] in our world. Because I think what most people's evoked set is of collapse is a road warrior. You know, it's like deserts. There's nothing out there, but no, no, no, we're, we're starting.

Our starting point for collapse is quite different from what people typically expect in their fantasies, right? Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think a lot of people, the other thing they think of is they go, Oh no, I'm being reasonable. It's not going to be like road warrior. It'll be more like a developed. being country, but no, no, we're starting developing country.

And the thing about developing countries is that they are going up from nothing. You know, they are building incrementally with every step of development, which is very different from a developed country collapsing. Developed countries collapse if it won't lead to very different cultural institutions than a struggling developing country and the the life on the ground of a developed country collapsing is astronomically worse than the life on the ground of an equivalent of an economically equivalent [00:06:00] developing country.

So I'll give an example here. One thing you see in South Africa right now is very frequent and rolling blackouts in a developing country. You are less likely to see this. The reason you are less likely to see this in a developing country is, and you do still see it occasionally, but like the regions are no, like, they make sure their major cities have electricity and then the outskirts, you know, because they're building new electrical stations to, you know, sort of push out their electrical power generating capacity instead of having a total net of electrical power generating capacity that is in the process of collapsing due to lack of maintenance due to political infighting, et cetera, that is very different.

And what it means when you have things like electricity regularly going out in a district is it means that many of the things that you take for granted, like restaurants or grocery stores are going to look dramatically differently. Restaurants really rely on. Refrigeration systems. Most stores really rely on refrigeration systems.

These types of [00:07:00] industries become very, very difficult to operate without privat