Balaji on the Tribal Lens: Reds, Blues, and Grays
Balaji’s back with new content
Hey MOZarts,
Balaji Srinivasan has been heads down working on new stuff. Then he called us to talk about it. The “First Course” is live now ( Apple | Spotify | YouTube). Balaji shares his theory of the Tribal Lens, why cognitive territories will gain increasingly more power than land-defined territories, why the US is no longer a beacon in the world, and his singular strategy for fixing San Francisco.
Below, some takeaways, and the books and articles Balaji cites during the episode.
Book & Article Recommendations from Balaji Srinivasan
54-40 or Fight, Emerson Hough
Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz, Tablet Magazine - End US Aid to Israel
US Navy Secretary admits that Chinese shipyards have more capacity
The Purge tweet: https://twitter.com/ansellundberg/status/1025398887488479234?s=46
Greta Thunberg mural: https://thespaces.com/a-60-ft-high-greta-thunberg-mural-pops-up-in-san-francisco/
Arizona's failed chip plant
Argentina's Unprecedented Economic Boom-to-Bust History
NYT Op Ed, To Save Our Economy Ditch Taiwan & Balaji’s Tweet
Louis-Vincent Gave, Making Sense of the China Meltdown, Gavekal:
Yoko Kubota, In China the Era of Western Car Makers is Over, Wall Street Journal
Beautifultrouble.org - Balaji refers to this as the degrowth handbook
Ian Morris, Why the West Rules - Stanford professor Ian Morris does an academic treatment of joules as a universal constant of a civilization’s government capacity, effective capacity and wealth recommended by Dan Romero
Also, check out The Network State Conference in Amsterdam on October 30 : https://lu.ma/tnsconf
Takeaways
We are in the early stages of what Balaji calls cloud cartography. Making maps of the minds is more important than making maps of the lands, because having power over cognitive territory enables you to have power over actual land territory. Case in point: Korea. That was never a historical division within Korea until modern history. The capitalists controlled the minds of the South Koreans. That difference – which we call polarization – became so large cognitively, they weren't just in separate social networks and considering themselves part of the same country. They literally became two different countries. And you couldn't do cross-border trade, you couldn't even do cross-border travel.
India and the US are converging. India’s Partition in 1947 is the model that Balaji predicts is coming for the US, with the society moving further apart cognitively and what follows is moving further apart physically. Meanwhile, India of today is looking like the US in the 1950s, where they are more unified around a national ideology, and the country can execute infrastructural initiatives as a society and effectively build.
Just like you can divide up politics into camps and the world into diplomatic powers, you can divide up the tribes of the world into Red, Blue, and Gray. If you’re in a Gray tribe, ask yourself, of the last 100 people you’ve conversed with – how many of them were in a ten mile radius? – Or even American? Gray is composed of tech people around the world who share the same values. Reds represent conservatism. And Blues stand for the present - which Balaji associates
with Democrats, #Me Too, Ukraine, Greta Thunberg, homeless industrial complex, foreign aid, etc. Dive in to the episode to learn more about how he maps these camps.The old political machine era of politics is done. The process-driven approach is just not working in poorly-run blue city states. Changing things on the ground level is possible by organizing differently. It is now possible to activate a thousand people in a decentralized way who are really committed to a cause and get a pretty significant amount of leverage, especially if you're tapping into the right mind map and dealing at a local level. As Balaji says, “Polarization is good. Polarization means organization” Head to the episode to hear his step-by-step plan for fixing the problems in San Francisco.
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Til then.
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Thanks for the link to the Network State conference! I had no idea this exists and I consider myself a Network State enjoyer :)