The Beach, the Kibbutz and the Metaverse

Stas Rybkin: We have come out onto a very long and virgin sandy beach. A pier of massive tarred logs runs out into the sea. Beside it we can see a fairly large motor launch. The water is so clear that the little boat seems to be hanging in mid-air. A little further along, by the boulders that close off the sandy crescent, lie three long boats.

I am going to ask the cameraman to shoot Zhenechka frolicking in the surf, while I, against this cheerful backdrop, put to Oleg Gennadievich one more question that has been troubling me.

Oleg Gennadievich, would you agree to answer one more question concerning the “fragility threshold”?

Oleg Batygin: Of course! With the greatest pleasure.

Stas Rybkin: During our last conversation you explained to us that a most hideous catastrophe lies dead ahead of the present civilization. But you said not a word about how that catastrophe might be avoided. Is there any such possibility at all?

Oleg Batygin: That question automatically splits into two. The first is “what realistic steps could we take in order to postpone the onset of the catastrophe?” The second is “how could civilization in principle be reorganized so as to avoid reaching the fragility threshold in the future?” One has to understand that the very idea of a total reorganization of life on the planet aimed at reducing its complexity and lowering its degree of centralization looks quite absurd.

To reorganize life across the whole Earth, a very high level of integration is required. A world government with absolute power is required. And integration is precisely the main cause of the system’s inevitable collapse. That is, in the case under discussion, in order to gain even a theoretical chance of ridding ourselves of the dragon, we first have to go and acquire one.

So I shall reformulate the second question after all, and put it like this: “How must a society be arranged so that the fragility threshold always stays a good distance away from it?”

At this point a certain “dialectic of intelligent design” comes into its own. It makes absolutely no difference whether what is happening is being done on the orders of some heavily empowered personages, or whether it is simply the spasms and convulsions of an enormous, entirely unconscious civilizational slime mould that has accidentally fallen off a branch into a hot campfire.

Slime moulds, by the way, are remarkably brainy chappies, despite the complete absence not only of heads but of any organs whatsoever. A slime mould is a single enormous cell with a multitude of nuclei.

The Japanese once laid out oat flakes on a map of the Tokyo area — exactly at the points where the towns stand. And released a plasmodium onto it. Within twenty-four hours it had grown a network of strands between the flakes that reproduced the Tokyo railway almost exactly.

No manager in this world has enough information about the workings of the system to say of himself, with full responsibility, “I am in control.” A manager is just a data node. He picks up the signals of other information nodes located nearby, and on that basis makes some sort of decisions.

It is not that the modern executive acts wholly unconsciously. No. He analyses something or other and even draws some sort of conclusions. It is simply that what he analyses is catastrophically incomplete data. He draws his conclusions under the most brutal shortage of information. And the time he has for a considered decision is always insufficient.

What has been said applies to any manager in this world. From the office manager of an advertising agency to the president of a northern European state.

As the fragility threshold draws nearer, the universe will defend itself ever more aggressively. The Hunter will scurry about, snapping links that are ever less dangerous. The new links that grow back will be shorter and less greedy.

When the global economic sphere does finally burst and fall apart, it will try to reassemble itself into several self-sufficient systems of smaller volume and complexity. Large companies will begin to sow the seeds of ever more independent subsidiaries.

Numerous distributed systems will spring up. Centralized systems will fight them. That struggle may prove very destructive and, in the end, bloody.

Such an aggressive confrontation between the centralized and the distributed strategies will undoubtedly only accelerate the pace of the system’s destructive changes. We are already so close to the fragility threshold that we can observe some of the destructive processes.

For instance, what the press has agreed to call “the pandemic” led to the isolation of the largest economies. All over the world the permeability of borders suddenly deteriorated. For people as much as for goods. One gets the impression that the world economy has suddenly decided to deglobalize. But we do understand that for every country to carry out a decision to deglobalize the economy without a murmur, global integration of the very highest order is required.

Or here is another example of that sort of convulsion in the system. The Asian countries of the Far East and South-East Asia are less socialist than the countries of the West. The social agenda is not the immutable basis of political decision-making there. Which is why the range of available actions is wider.

The developed Asian countries inverted certain social strategies typical of the West quite a long time ago. For example, they arranged state support for small business at the expense of big business.

At first glance this looks promising. The Asian business landscape is a riot of lively and active small enterprises.

People in the prosperous part of Asia take up new businesses readily. Little coastal vessels scuttle along the shores. In the cities, quarters of coppersmiths, tanners, electronics men and artists are growing. All of it resembles some sort of cheerful, humane, computerized Middle Ages.

But the tragedy is that small business grown on the hydroponics of state funding acquires all the same problems as big business fused with the state. Its management degrades. Entrepreneurs take out numerous state loans they have no intention of repaying. They abandon unsuccessful ventures lightly, because they are offered an exceptionally soft bankruptcy mechanism.

If you go a little way into what looks like virgin forest, in Central Thailand for instance, you will very quickly stumble upon resorts and restaurants abandoned and swallowed by the jungle.

The centres of Asian cities are constantly shifting. And entrepreneurs lightly abandon their settled businesses in the former, now deserted centre of city life, and open them up again in the new clot of activity. The cities seem to crawl across the Earth, following their migrating centres. It is perfectly obvious that gigantic economic losses arise in the process. As for “dangerous links”, subsidized small business generates even more of them, simply because in its situation there are many more objects capable of linking up with one another.

The civilizational slime mould has a kind of immunity to the fragility threshold. Left to itself, it will perhaps find ways of resisting dangerous tendencies tactically. Over a long stretch of time, however, resistance of that sort is doomed. All the slime mould’s “defensive spasms” are in fact a conversion of the health of its structure into extra lifetime.

The fragility threshold can be pushed a long way back by a rapid and powerful expansion of humanity into space. The space economy is expansive and open-ended. In space there is room to build entirely new business landscapes. Gigantic funds, possessed of a mighty gravity, can be pulled out of intensive multidimensional speculation and thrown into the relatively simple and comprehensible extensive spread of civilization across the Solar System.

Intuitively the situation is easy to grasp. While the first settlers are still rolling their wagons across the prairie, their life is rational, simple and natural. The moonshine, the incest and the fratricide begin after they have settled down, each in his own spot.

But going into space, too, only postpones the fragility threshold; it does not solve the problem entirely. As soon as the new frontiers of the territory available to humanity have been fixed, integration, intensification, centralization and the growth of bad complexity will all come back.

I think this is a convenient point at which to move on to the second question. How must a civilization be arranged so that the fragility threshold does not threaten it, at least in the near future? I can see only two options here. The first is a virtual civilizational space. A metaverse. The Matrix. Cyber-oriented transhumanism and all the ferocious hardcore that goes with it. Only using human bodies, even as batteries, is strongly not recommended. There is far too much uncertainty in human bodies.

A civilization that takes from the real world little more than a bit of electric current, silicon and metal is entirely spared the need to grow insane architectures of links saturated with uncertainty. All of such a civilization’s uncertainty-related activity is directed solely at keeping the host computer intact and, possibly, at gradually enlarging it. That is a simple, measured, predictable activity, best handled by robots of no great complexity.

Inside the computer, meanwhile, the civilization can build architectures of literally any complexity. Since the amount of uncertainty in the virtual links, their greed, and even the aggressiveness of the Hunter can be altered at will in the configs of the system and of each of its separate modules. One can in fact set it all up so that the links inside that architecture carry no uncertainty at all. A virtual world can perfectly well be ideal. That is precisely why I am no supporter of the “simulation hypothesis”. If we live in a simulation, why did the developer place in it this uncertainty, which dooms the system to collapse?

Stas Rybkin: Perhaps for the developer collapses are simply a regular part of how the system works.

Oleg Batygin: Quite so, yes. Like the periodic destruction of Zion in the Matrix already mentioned above. And there, incidentally, is another stunning advantage of the virtual civilizational machine. It can be restarted, backed up and upgraded whenever you please.

The second version of a civilization resistant to the fragility threshold is meant to be built right here, in brutal reality.

Imagine that Pol Pot and Greta Thunberg fell asleep on a green meadow somewhere in the mountains of Northern Vietnam. They had a single dream between them. And in that dream they saw a world that suited them both perfectly.

What will such a world look like? First of all, there must be no large cities in it. Just not a single one. It must be an exceptionally ecological world in which literally everybody feeds off the land, lives in small communities and observes a fat volume of progress-restraining regulations.

I am on the whole not a malicious man, and so a reality of that sort appears to me as a planet entirely covered with a multitude of small farms, on the model of the Israeli kibbutzim. People in those tiny settlements live not badly at all. They eat excellent food and drink excellent wine. They are free to indulge in the most refined carnal pleasures and to create radiant masterpieces of art. And I should like to hope that activity of that sort will be able to replace, for the inhabitants of this ecologically optimal world, high sociality and technical creativity.

The marvellous green idyll must in reality be an utterly inhuman dictatorship. In the first place, people in such a world will have to be forbidden to leave their places of residence. Otherwise the vagrants might consolidate somewhere beyond the mountains and create a new large city there.

In the second place, a society of this kind must control the birth rate in the harshest possible way. If a community grows too large, it will require more food, more technology, more brains. The settlement risks degenerating into a city.

The principal task of such a civilization will be permanent technological self-castration. Technological growth means growing complexity. And growing complexity brings the fragility threshold closer.

An idyllic, sugary, green world of that sort will, of the most brutal necessity, turn out to be a world of total control, in which technical geniuses are hunted down like plague rats. And the hunting, it appears, will have to be done by other technical geniuses whose brains have been washed in a particular way. Only a technical genius can track down and destroy a technical genius. Everybody else has too few technical means at their disposal for it.

I have little wish to think about how such a society might be brought about in practice. Clearly the stumbling block here is that same “paradox of global integration”. The whole construction described is aimed at preventing integration on a planetary scale. And at the same time it requires unfailing planet-wide control. Which means planetary integration.

One can imagine some sort of chips implanted in the brains of the former scientific and technical elite that organizes this whole green bacchanalia… A caring SKYNET built on the current Chinese IJOP… But I have absolutely no wish to imagine any of it.

Stas Rybkin: Both pictures look entirely unappealing. So the Noon Universe is not in the cards for us. We shall not be flying to the stars…

Oleg Batygin: You have put that very well. The fragility threshold hypothesis fully explains why space looks so empty. The cleverest civilizations have climbed into virtual reality. The simpler sort are sitting in their kibbutzim. They are not even allowed to solder a plain crystal radio set. And the rest laid down their bones at the fragility threshold, and now their hairy descendants catch rats with their teeth in radioactive caves.

Stas Rybkin: It never ceases to surprise me that in a place so beautiful in every respect we discuss such frightening things without end.

Oleg Batygin: It seems to me there is a certain regularity in that. The brighter and more cloudless the surrounding reality, the more horrible and frightening the dreams I personally tend to have. On the island, especially at the very beginning of my life here, I was constantly dreaming monstrous horrors. It stopped when the planet-wide disgrace we have been observing of late began. Apparently sleep somehow compensates for the quantity of stress when it drops below the background level one is born with.

Stas Rybkin: And indeed, ever since I arrived I have felt as though I were in a dream. Sometimes the dream is utterly blissful, sometimes, on the contrary, it frightens. But it does not leave one indifferent. Do you think Zhenechka has frightening dreams here too?

Oleg Batygin: Quite possibly.

Stas Rybkin: You would never guess it from her. Look what they are up to over there in the shallows. She has lured two black lads over. And now the lads are making her a “bridge” out of interlaced arms, off which she dives with a shriek. The sight is exceptionally cheerful and, at the same time, sexual. We shall have to cut those frames out and send them to TikTok. Though Zhenechka always manages to send content to TikTok before I have even thought of it.

Oleg Batygin: And what does Zhenya do on your team, if it is not a secret?

Stas Rybkin: What secret could there be? She is our SMM specialist and the female face of the channel, both at once. She has a very well-developed Instagram account. Something like seven million subscribers. We take her along with us. That way Zhenya gets interesting content for her Instagram and at the same time promotes our channel. It is symbiosis rather than employment. We pay Zhenechka no salary whatsoever. We only cover hotel rooms and travel expenses.

Oleg Batygin: Interesting. In the modern world personal freedom has begun to take on rather bizarre and at the same time strangely “light” and natural forms. A pity that all of it may soon come to an end.

Stas Rybkin: Well, maybe we will get away with it.

Oleg Batygin: That we may. You and I may well get away with it. At least I hope so.

It strikes me as sheer blasphemy to distract Zhenya from her swim. Let us leave her here and move on to the next point of the excursion ourselves. The cameraman, I suppose, will have to be invited along after all. And ask him to bring a portable lamp. It may be a little dark in the grotto.

Stas Rybkin: So we are going into a grotto? Under the mountain?

Oleg Batygin: The grotto is not too deep, it is picturesque and quite cosy. I lived there until I built the first house. And it was in that grotto that I had the most horrible dreams. Simply because it was, I suppose, the most serene time of my life.

I thought about practically nothing serious back then. My mind rested. In the morning I swam. Then I did physical work on the construction site alongside the labourers. Then, until the sun went down, I read or drew. In the evening I would walk up to the pass to watch the sunset. I came down in the dark. I bathed before bed and fell asleep in that grotto.

The workers slept in tents. They were locals, and locals for some reason are wary of sleeping in caves, and in natural shelters generally. I think it has to do with beliefs of some kind. All the locals believe in spirits. Including the professors of the largest universities here…

Stas Rybkin: Then let us switch the camera off for a while and move the necessary equipment over to the grotto. Lights, the generator and the rest.

Oleg Batygin: Let us.