16. Agency in the Developing World 🔗

Income/wealth inequality is not a good proxy for agency inequality. Many developing countries have high $ inequality but admirably egalitarian levels of suckagency. The system is a robust nexus of homeostatic suckage in which nobody has significantly higher suckagency than others

Lemme elaborate on what I was getting at in this tweet and also complicate your thinking about robots and AIs and NPCs and botfood trashmobs and UBI along the way.

Weak infrastructure means nominally powerful (wealthy, warlordy, politicians) can do less. Warlords have AK-47s, hobby drones but not Predator drones or an NSA. The wealthy can party or get surgery in Switzerland on numbered account $ but only enjoy limited lifestyles at home.

The state is large but ineffective so there’s a limit to what you can do with political power. High-level corruption is easy, but a smoothly running and legal crony capitalist extract/exploit/oppress machine needs developed country infrastructure, modulo curse of resources.

An old R. K. Laxman cartoon from socialist-era India captures this. A poor farmer is remarking to a politician touring a storm-hit village: “Oh the cyclone did crores* worth of damage to our village? Great! I didn’t think our village had more than Rs. 50!”

* 1 crore =10 million

In developing world, you feel tossed about by fate, but it’s a natural sort of fate that afflicts the powerful almost as much. In the developed world, infrastructure represents a pie of real beyond-nature agency to master fate with, but a few dominate it. The rest feel hapless.

Frustrations of striving haplessly for a better life differ. Here it can feel like everything is rigged against you by a few. Bankers, CEOs and whatnot dungeon-master small gods. There, striving can feel like trying to violate laws of physics. Favor of small gods is little help.

Net result is paradox of the median psyche. The median developing world person has less absolute control over their life, but takes more charge of it. Even emo poets hustle more. The median developed world person has more absolute control but acts more helpless and hapless.

There is more of a sense of being a pawn/npc in consequential games of powerful, which are easier to simply tolerate as a low-impact annoyance tax in developing world. Basic tradeoff is higher basic standard of living, but lower relative agency over life terms and conditions.

It’s not that developing world people are made of sterner stuff. It’s just that the weak simply... die. You can’t drag on lives of debt traps, major illness, social isolation, indefinitely like you can in developed world. The suckage continuously culls the weak, deservedly or not

Or to put it another way, it would be much harder for a class of true hikkikomori to emerge in developing world. There simply isn’t enough fat in the infrastructure to carry them for very long, or maintain them in psychological quasi-stability with video games.

It’s like developed world countries make you click a huge TOS “I agree” button on a bigger social contract the instant you’re born. Lots of comfort and convenience lie beyond the button, but you sign away more relative agency. Like take life/death power credit scores have in US.

Developing world, the social contract covers so little, you cannot sign away a lot even if you want to. Your air conditioner and fridge can’t spy on you if there’s no electricity half the time. Where there is no water supply to begin with, a Flint-like situation is moot.

The reason of course is that for a few decades the developed world was constructing mindless wealth-making machines out of human-NPCs. The lowest strata of humans were more valuable alive-but-haplessly-consuming-on-credit than dead.

"The universe is an animal, it grazes on the ordinary. It creates infinite idiots just to eat them...You know, smart people get a chance to climb on top and take reality for a ride but it'll never stop trying to throw you. And eventually it will, there's no other way off" - Rick

Things are changing of course, and very fast. Developing world governments/elites are figuring out how to gain western level control over populations without providing western level Comfort and Convenience in return. Cheaper hunger games fodder.

There is a weird political leapfrogging here. Developed world had to actually develop to allow median citizen to enter “I shall be obedient pawn” TOS with elite Small Gods of Universe. The developing world is skipping that. NPC-pawnification via smartphones without development!

You can see the effects among developed world elites: the bottom layers of learned helplessness they created have turned into liabilities. Conservatism has evolved into a “why don’t you just die?” kind of anger towards them. They are genuinely envious of developing country elites

Developing country elites can now get masses of NPC pawns in return for promising 1/100th the rewards. Developing world NPCs to populate Straussian Games can be had for pennies on the dollar. Ad-clicking zombies? Pennies in the dollar. Fox-waching zombies? Pennies on the dollar.

This is the backdrop against which AI/robot stuff must be considered. Human-NPCs being replaced were promised a certain TOS lifestyle at a certain agency-price. There’s new work they could do, but manufactured haplessness/sense of TOS-betrayal makes them mostly capable of anger.

Apply working:dependent population logic to them. Working population + technology will now need to support retirees, children... and angry/hapless no-longer-needed NPCs whose best-case life outcome now is safety-net+family-dependency+hikkikomori pleasures.

This logic puts a new interpretation on idea of UBI. It is best viewed as a “free future hikkikomori before they get so mad they burn everything down” move. Renegotiate the basic social contract to be more like the developing world. You get less, but in a form you control more.

This overall convergent pattern of evolution in developed and developing world points to a particular kind of human condition. Elites cheaply controlling masses of human NPCs, robots, and AIs, offering much less material plenty than before (airline amenities anyone?) in return.

This is important: BOTH developed and developing worlds are converging to a new asymptote. It’s a mistake to think that either 1st world is going 3rd world or 3rd world is going 1st. Both are going 2nd world (now we finally know what 2nd world actually is: software-eaten world!)

You can either join this budget airline of a civilizational path, or make the reverse tradeoff of industrial modernity: more agency, less stuff. Climate action pressures will simply add gradually increasing stress in this direction.