The End Of Culture
For years now, I’ve collected ideas for fixing cultural drift, and tried to judge which seem more promising. Thankfully, my efforts seem to finally be converging. Let’s set aside the terrible or infeasible options of restarting cultural evolution either by collapsing society so far that we revive the simple harsh world of centuries ago, or by fragmenting our world into many sufficiently insular units. Aside from these, I now see our most promising fixes as modest variations on the same general approach: replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering.
This general approach requires us to accomplish three big things, none of which are easy. Our specific options vary mainly in the order we do these, and in how much each helps the others. These three things to accomplish are: 1) learn more about how to manage culture, 2) create governance systems better able to achieve the goals we give them, and 3) change the values that we use to direct our governance systems toward more valuing adaption, either directly or indirectly.
First, we must learn much more about how to deliberately track and steer cultural change. One promising approach here is to work harder to learn how to monitor and manage corporate cultures. (Perhaps via combo prediction markets.) Success there might be quite profitable, as cultural decay is the main way firms now lose value, and might also enable and inspire efforts to manage cultures on larger scales.
If management of culture turns out to be surprisingly easy, then maybe existing governance would be up to this task. But more likely, we will need governance systems more competent than those we now use on large scales. So that when we assign to them the task of making culture more adaptive, they actually achieve that result. And so this is the second big thing we must accomplish. Possibilities for more competent forms of government include futarchy, and for-profit governance.
Widespread adoption of for-profit-governance on larger scales could plausibly result from mass elimination of our many current limits on the scope of capitalism in our lives. As cultural drift over the last few centuries has resulted mainly from capitalism changing its areas too fast for other areas not run by capitalism to keep up, drift seems solved by letting capitalism run everything.
Luckily we do now let capitalism run most all of our AI world, so cultural drift might be fixed soon after AIs replace humans wholesale in the economy. Though AI capitalism might become much more limited if we either love or hate AIs too much.
Alas, most people today hate the idea of unleashing capitalism to run everything for ordinary humans, including their fertility and governance. Therefore, the third big thing we must accomplish, and the hardest, is to change common values to more favor adaption, either directly or indirectly. Unleashing capitalism indirectly promotes adaption, and we might instead come to more directly value adaptation, and task competent governance institutions with achieving it. For example, we might make markets estimating the future adaptive success of particular small groups, and give those who govern such groups strong incentives to make such estimates rise. Reward if rise, fire if fall.
Alas, it seems quite hard to get most people to value the adaptive success of their groups. But for groups that are large enough, it might work nearly as well to get them to value earlier dates for concrete achievements that would plausibly be delayed by civilization collapse. Such as when do a million people live in space, or when do we achieve immortality for ordinary humans.
Thus “all” we need to do to fix cultural drift is to 1) learn to manage cultures, 2) adopt more competent governance systems, and 3) change our values, directly or indirectly, to more value adaption. Easy-peasy.
I think the major cultural drift happened well before AI.
Culture was once reinforced by scarcity and repetition. A society might have had three television networks, five major radio stations, a few newspapers, common schools, common institutions, and relatively homogeneous local communities. People did not agree on everything, but they were repeatedly exposed to the same stories, public figures, rituals, and reference points.
Cable television, satellite TV, YouTube, and eventually social media broke that shared environment apart. Once everyone could choose among thousands or millions of channels, culture stopped being something a society broadly received together and became something each person assembled for themselves.
That brought real benefits. Minority interests could find communities. Gatekeepers lost control. More voices could participate. But it also meant that cultural selection no longer happened primarily at the level of the society. It began happening inside increasingly isolated attention markets.
We now live in overlapping bubbles with different facts, heroes, moral priorities, enemies, and definitions of success. The problem is not simply that culture drifts. It is that there is no longer one cultural environment doing the selecting.
AI may intensify this by giving every person an endlessly personalized media universe, but it did not originate the process. It is the next stage of a transition from mass culture to individualized culture.
That makes deliberate cultural steering harder than managing a corporate culture. A company can define membership, leadership, incentives, and objectives. A modern society cannot easily decide who is steering, which values count as adaptation, or whether a shared culture should even be the goal.
I doubt a highly fragmented information environment is capable of producing a coherent culture at all.
I'd really love to see some of your collection, rather than just the generalizations. What are great examples of overcoming cultural drift? Also a sharper definition of culture in this sense.
I've worked with a number of different companies and one of the things it has convinced me of is that the culture that led to success almost always decays. And successful companies have their culture profoundly changed by the scale that comes with success.
I have a long relationship with a company that I have watched grow from $800 million in revenue to $4 billion. They will tell you that the culture is the secret of their success, and I believe it is. But aspects of that culture have changed dramatically. The incentives structure is still sound though, so it all works.
Do you have any great examples of companies or organizations that have "turned their culture around?" I would love to read about them.
All of my anecdotal experience leads me to conclude that it is almost always easier to build a new company than it is to redress the culture of an old one.