Preface
This is a self-published book by Denis Cavatassi, who is a regular at our Bitcoin meetup in Phuket. This book has a much broader focus than Bitcoin, although it also touches on that.
The Invisible Revolution covers the whole history of Homo Sapiens and describes the most important “state changes”. The examples are nomadic to stationary transition, or transition from steam to bits.
Quotes
I don’t want to spoil the story, so I’ll just comment on a few quotes I found particularly interesting:
Power was not born to dominate, it was born to solve problems.
I’d argue it’s actually both. Some people have a drive to dominate, but the only way to achieve this goal is giving something in return.
The world had become calculable and when a world becomes calculable, it becomes governable.
Yes, history of the state is basically the history of standardization.
And when the collective identity becomes more important than a person, the individual ceases to be an end.
I don’t think an individual was ever the end. We identified ourselves with our tribes and then larger identities emerged. Greek city-states had their own strong identities, with Greek identity being a weak secondary identity. In an age of the nation states, national identities flipped that equation.
Many political rights were not granted out of generosity, but out of fear.
Absolutely. Good elites survive by agreeing to compromises, while more stubborn elites get replaced by violent revolutions.
History does not divide the world into good and bad. It divides it into those who have the advantage and those who suffer it. And the roles change.
The context of that quote is colonialism. The author is concerned about China “paying back” because it took the lead on the world stage. I think it’s a valid concern. Some would say it’s a European projection, but the same forces that pushed old Europe to expand are also present everywhere else.
Most of the historical evil was not committed by monsters. It was committed by who believed they were doing the right thing.
Historical evil is a subjective term, but I don’t think that people can perceive themselves as malicious, so I’d agree that most people in power are quite self-righteous.
We look back and see injustice clearly.
Most of us, I hope, but not all. Thinking about justice is a privilege, if the material conditions keep worsening, zero sum thinking will get more prevalent.
Science had answered the question “Can it be done?”. No one asked “Should it be done?”.
The context here is nuclear weapons. This line of thinking is important because it questions inevitability of progress. Unfortunately, people are more focused on adapting to the environment than on reshaping the environment via collective action.
To make everyone equal, those who excel must be eliminated. To abolish property, you have to abolish freedom.
Hard disagree here. People who excel are free to excel pretty much everywhere and nomads were free without property, so it’s not a sacred condition freedom is built upon.
Algorithms want nothing, have not intentions, no ideology.
Algorithms are designed by people who have wants, intentions and ideology. If we’re talking about machine learning, training data adds even more bias. I think it’s important to keep that in mind, because people behind this really want us to think it’s a black box absolving all the responsibility.
For the first time, complexity is growing faster than the collective understanding of it.
Yes, this is a huge problem with no clear solution. I can only think of reducing complexity, but it requires sacrifices.
I didn’t have time to learn when I was working.
The context is a story of a guy being sacked due to automation. As someone who had no time to think or learn anything for a while due to being extremely busy at work, I can totally relate to that. Many stupid things are happening because we don’t have enough people who can stop for a minute and reflect on that mess.
Conclusion
The Invisible Revolution is an attempt to make sense of a historical process and highlight the main changes in relations between humans and nature. It’s a well-paced and relatively short book, explaining its thesis pretty well.