Review of Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever

 AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. 

 

 

There is a notion that science fiction is a form of future history, that science-based hard SF predicts future technology. This is almost entirely wrong. Issac Asimov’s robots had positronic brains and obeyed the three laws of robotics, Arthur C. Clark’s aliens hollowed out asteroids and humanity became a deathless spacefaring species of pure mind, Larry Niven’s Ringworld surrounded a star at its centre. Space empires feature in many books, as does colonisation of the solar system, generation ships travelling to distant stars, people crossing space in cryogenic stasis or as uploaded minds. After decades of reading hard SF and believing that humanity’s destiny was in space, I know that none of this has happened, and lately I have accepted with great sadness that none of it is likely to happen any time soon.

 

In his book on ideas about the future of humanity, Adam Becker describes his experience of this: ‘When I was a kid, I thought Star Trek was a documentary about the future … that this was the future that smart adults had worked out as the best one, that this was what we were going to do … We’d go to space, we’d seek out new life and new civilizations, and we’d do a lot of science. I was six, and that sounded pretty good to me.’  He then says ‘The future, I knew, ultimately lay in space, and going there would solve many - maybe even all - of the problems here on earth. I believed that for a long, long time.’

 

His book is also about a group of influential people who have taken SF as an attempt to predict the future, the tech billionaires who ‘explicitly use SF as a blueprint.’  Elon Musk (Tesla) wants to go to Mars, Jeff Bezos (Amazon) wants a trillion people in space, Sam Altman (OpenAI , the developer of Chat GPT) thinks AI will literally produce everything, Marc Andreessen (a leading Silicon Valley investor) wants a techno-capitalist machine to conquer the cosmos with AI. The list goes on. 

 

Becker argues the ‘credence that tech billionaires give to these specific SF futures validates their pursuit of more … in the name of saving humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist.’  That threat is a machine superintelligence that can rapidly improve itself, leading to an out of control Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) whose creation could, would or will be an extinction event, because an ‘unaligned AGI’ does not share human gaols or motives. 

 

Becker’s book dissects the ideas and ideology that many tech billionaires believe. He follows the money through the institutes, organisations and foundations that they fund, finding the connections and overlaps between networks of funders, researchers, philosophers, philanthropists, authors, advocates and activists. Over six lengthy chapters he discusses the history and development of eight separate but similar belief systems, that collectively I’m calling the ‘transhumanist bundle.’ Transhumanism is ‘the belief that we can and should use advanced technology to transform ourselves, transcending humanity’,  and it is the foundational set of ideas shared by the tech billionaires. 

 

Transhumanism is using technology to create a new ‘posthuman’ species with characteristics such as an indefinitely long lifespan, augmented cognitive capability, enhanced senses, and superior rationality. It was originally a mid-20th century idea associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, an intelligence explosion that would allow humanity to break free from time and space and ‘merge with the divine’ (he was a Catholic priest), then popularised by his friend Julian Huxley with his ideas on transcendence and using selective breeding to create the best version of our species possible. Nick Bostrom founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998, rebranded as Humanity+ in 2008 with its mission ‘the ethical use of technology and evidence-based science to expand human capabilities.’ His Future of Humanity Institute was founded in 2005 and closed in 2024. 

 

The transhuman bundle of ideologies has become enormously influential, especially in Silicon Valley and the tech industry, and have been a motivating force behind a lot of the research and development of AGI. Followers of this movement typically believe that AGI will become capable of self-improvement and therefore create the singularity. As Becker notes, there is an element of groupthink at work here. Besides Musk, Bezos and Andreessen, billionaires associated with these ideologies include Peter Thiel, Jaan Tallinn, Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz, and Vitalik Buterin, whose donations finance institutes, promote researchers, and support the movement. 

 

Becker starts with effective altruism, known for the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried who funded effective altruism conferences, institutes and organisations before his conviction for fraud. Based on the ideas of utilitarian philosophers Peter Singer, William MacAskill and Toby Ord, the premise was that people should donate as much of their income as possible to causes that provide maximum benefit to mankind, the ‘earn to give’ idea. Initially the focus was on global poverty, but later morphed into a focus on AI safety, based on the assumption that  the threat of extinction from unaligned AGI is the greatest threat to humanity. 

 

MacAskill gave effective altruism an ethical perspective based on the very long-term future and a view that what is morally right is also good. Because the future could potentially contain billions or trillions of people, failing to bring these future people into existence would be morally wrong. Longtermism is therefore closely associated with effective altruism, MacAskill (‘positively influencing the longterm future is the key moral priority of our time’), and Ord  (‘longtermism is animated by a moral re-orientation toward the vast future that existential risks threaten to foreclose’). 

 

Longtermism is based on the reasoning that, if the aim is to positively affect the greatest number of people possible and if the future could contain trillions of future digital and spacefaring people, then we should focus our efforts today on enabling that far future, instead of focusing on current people and contemporary problems, except for preventing catastrophes like unaligned AGI or pandemics. The utilitarian calculation is that the low probability of this future is outweighed by the enormous number of future people. On longtermism Becker says ‘The likelihood of these futures is small, not just because they are scientifically implausible but also because they’re rather specific, depending on so many small things falling into place, things we can’t know about.’

 

Then there is Singularitarianism, a related idea that there will be a technological ‘singularity’ with the creation of AGI. This would be an ‘intelligence explosion’, a point in time when technological progress becomes recursive and so rapid it alters humanity. Associated with Ray Kurzweil and his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, when humans will merge with intelligent machines and expand into space to flood the universe with consciousness, which he predicted would happen by 2045. His new 2025 book is called The Singularity is Nearer. A different version from Nick Bostrom takes creating Superintelligence (the title of his 2014 book) as the transformative moment that enables us to become posthuman and colonise space. 

 

Eliezer Yudkowsky predicts the singularity will happen in ‘more like five years than fifty years’ from now. He believes an unaligned AGI is an existential threat and all AI research should be stopped until there is a way to ensure a future AGI will not kill us all. His Machine Intelligence Research Institute (founded 2005) website opens with: ‘The AI industry is racing toward a precipice. The default consequence of the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) is human extinction. Our survival depends on delaying the creation of ASI, as soon as we can, for as long as necessary’.

 

Rationalism arose around a website founded in 2009  by Yudkowsky called Less Wrong, ‘dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making’ and motivated by his fear of the threat of an unaligned AGI that exterminates humanity in pursuit of some obscure AI goal, like using all available matter (including humans) to create more computing capacity. This is Bostrom’s paperclip problem, where a powerful AI kills everyone and converts the planet, galaxy and eventually the universe into paperclips because that was the goal it was given, or more generally, a ‘misaligned AGI is an existential catastrophe.’

 

Extropianism was another variant of Transhumanism, with the foundation of the Extropy Institute in 1992 by Max Moore, who defined extropy as ‘the extent of a system’s intelligence, information, order, vitality and capacity for improvement’. The Institute’s magazine covered AI, nanotechnology, life extension and cryonics, neuroscience and intelligence increasing technology, and space colonisation. The Institute closed in 2006, but it successfully spread transhumanism through its conferences and email list. 

 

Cosmism combines these ideas with sentient AI and mind uploading technology, leaving biology behind by merging humans and technology to create virtual worlds and develop spacetime engineering and science. Originating with Nikolai Fedorov, a Russian Christian ‘late nineteenth century philosopher and librarian’ who believed technology would allow the dead to be resurrected, and the cosmos to be filled by ‘everyone who ever lived.’ There is a strong eschatological element to the transhumanist bundle, with the centrality of belief in transcendence and immortality.

 

Effective accelerationism is the most recent addition to this movement. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published his ‘Techno-Capitalist Manifesto’ in 2023 and argued ‘advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do’, technology is ‘liberatory’, opponents of AI development are the enemy, and the future will be about ‘overcoming nature.’  Andreessen writes a ‘common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true, yet more than offset by the freedom to create our lives that flows from the material abundance created by our use of machines.’

 

There is significant overlap between these different ideologies, and the argument that an AGI will safeguard and expand humanity in the future allows believers in the transhumanist bundle to make creating AGI the most important task in the present. This utopian element of the transhumanist bundle believes a powerful enough AGI will solve problems like global warming, energy shortages and inequality. In fact, the race to develop AGI is inflicting real harm on racial and gender minorities (through profiling based on white males), the disabled (who are not included in training data), and developing countries affected by climate change and the energy consumption of AI. 

 

There are so many problems with the transhumanist bundle. Becker argues they are reductive, ‘in that they make all problems about technology’, for tech billionaires they are profitable, and they offer transcendence, ‘ignoring all limitations … conventional morality … and death itself.’ He calls this ‘collection of related concepts and philosophies … the ideology of technological salvation.’ The transhumanist bundle has presented progress toward AGI as inevitable and grounded in scientific and engineering principles. However, while science is used as a justification for these beliefs, the reality is that they are scientifically implausible.

 

First, AGI has not been achieved, and may not ever be achievable. Superintelligent machine do not exist, but the corporations developing AI have convinced policy-makers and politicians that preventing a hypothetical AI apocalypse should be taken seriously. Second, the threat of unaligned AGI is used to divert attention from the actual harms of bias and discrimination that are being done. Third, mind uploading will not be possible any time soon, and may never be possible given how little understood human intelligence, consciousness and brains are. 

 

Fourth, space colonisation is difficult. It may have to be done by robots because space is increasingly understood to be an inhospitable environment for people, given half a chance it will kill or harm anyone. Mars dust is toxic, Moon regolith is sharp splinters, Venus is hot and the moons of Jupiter cold. There is no air or water. Gravity seems to be necessary for health and growth. The technology to launch and build large space stations or hollow out and terraform asteroids is non-existent. 

 

Fifth, sustained economic or technological exponential growth is impossible, but is built into effective accelerationism, longtermism and the singularity. Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, where technological advances feed on themselves to increase the rate of further advance, is neither supported by the history of technology, which shows diminishing returns as technologies mature, nor the laws of physics, which imposes physical limits on size, speed and power. 

 

In his conclusion Becker asks the question “if not an immortal future in space, then what? ‘He answers ‘I don't know. The futures of technological salvation are sterile impossibilities and they would be brutally destructive if they come to pass.’ He quotes George Orwell: Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness’, and argues the problems facing humanity are social and political problems that AI is unlikely to help with. ‘Technology can't heal the world. We have to do that ourselves.’ He suggests technology can be directed and we have to make choices about what we want technology to do as part of the solution to our problems. 

 

His ’specific policy proposal’ is to tax billionaires because there is ‘no real need for anyone to have more money than half a billion dollars’, with personal wealth above that returned to society and invested in health, education and ‘everything else it takes to make a modern thriving economy.’ This would address inequality and provide political stability, and  ‘Without billionaires, fringe philosophies like rationalism and effective accelerationism would stay on the fringe, rather than being pulled into the mainstream through the reality-warping power of concentrated wealth.’ 

 

This is a really interesting book that draws together a lot of scattered threads that are not commonly or obviously connected. Becker has deeply researched these ideas and people, who he quotes extensively in their own words (there are 80 pages of references in the Notes). His analysis is sharp and the critique is insightful. The delusional futurism of the tech billionaires is exposed as self-serving and dangerous. 

 

A more structured format with shorter, more focused chapters would make all the detail easier to follow. The chapters are long, between 40 and 60 pages, and each one covers a number of different related topics, for example he covers Kurzweil’s singularity and Eric Drexler’s nanotechnology in the same chapter, but these could have had their own chapters. This doesn’t affect readability, as an experienced science writer Becker writes well, but it makes it hard to keep track of what was discussed where.  The absence of an index doesn’t help either. 

 

Science fiction is stories about possible futures that may or may not happen, that may not be physically or practically achievable within any reasonable timespan. The further into the future a story is set, the less likely it is to be realised. Becker argues to base decisions today on such future stories ignores the problems that challenge us in the present, and to substitute the hypothetical danger of AGI for the real issues of climate change, geopolitical instability, inequality and economic uncertainty is foolish. Therefore the tech billionaires and the ideology of the transhuman bundle they follow is a real threat to the future of humanity. 

 

 

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Colonies and Silicon Valley’s Quest to Control the Future of Humanity. Basic Books, 2025.  

Rethinking the Deep Past

NB. Holiday post, off topic and longer than usual. Follows and mirrors last years holiday post on Researching the Far Future.

There is a conventional, widely held and well-understood story about the progress of humanity from pre-history to the present. After starting as a hunter-gatherer society after the end of the last ice age around 15,000 BCE (in Before the Current Era notation), the beginning of farming from 10,000 BCE led to the first villages of the Neolithic period. By 7,000 BCE the early agricultural societies in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica and China had emerged, followed a few thousand years later by the first Bronze Age city states, which in turn led to civilization as we understand it today, as a form of social organization with advanced technological capabilities.

In the conventional narrative, farming saved humanity from a primitive hunter gatherer existence, allowing us to settle down and build villages, which over time became the city states that were the centres of these early civilisations. City populations grew as people took advantage of the security from raiders and the cultural and economic opportunities living inside the city walls created. By 3000 BCE Mesopotamian cities like Ur, Nippur and Lagash had populations as large as 50,000 people, enclosed by enormous city walls, behind which society was organised with a king/emperor at the top and classes of priests, administrators, warriors, merchants and peasants or slaves. Most of the thousands of clay tablets, the earliest evidence of writing, found in the stone ruins of these cities are tax records of grain harvests, and thousands of small bowls used to dole out rations have also been found.

The historical record also shows the periodic collapse of these city states, usually attributed to disease, barbarian invasions or insurgency, plunging ancient civilisations in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica into periods called ‘Dark Ages’ during which the cities with their cultures and civilizations slowly get rebuilt. Thus, under the story told by the conventional narrative, civilizations rose and fell in a cyclical pattern with the growth and decline of these city-states. There is, however, a lot more to the story than this, and these cycles of history are not really an explanation of the frequency and severity of collapses of ancient civilizations.

*

In an unintended coincidence I started and finished 2017 with two books about ancient history. The first was Eric Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014), which looks at the sudden end, after centuries of stability, of the civilized world of the Bronze Age. The sophisticated economies and cultures of the late second millennium BCE stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, with the eight major kingdoms of Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians and Babylonians linked by extensive diplomacy, commerce, trade and intermarriage. This interdependent world and its writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture suddenly ceased to exist as all the kingdoms collapsed over the course of a few decades. Over fifty years at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again. Then followed a few centuries of a ‘Dark Age’ after the collapse of these Bronze Age civilizations, before Iron Age societies emerged, first in Greece and later Rome

The commonly accepted reason for the collapse was invasion and sacking of these cities by the Sea Peoples, marauders from the Western Mediterranean, but Cline presents evidence to support a argument of multiple interconnected failures, as more than one natural and man-made cataclysm caused the disintegration and fall of these ‘empires and globalized peoples’. Because they were so strongly linked together and interdependent, the collapse of one of the kingdoms led to the decline and collapse of the others. He concludes the primary cause of the collapse was climate change, which led to social breakdown and internal rebellions by an underclass of peasant populations facing severe food shortages, as well as invasions by migrating peoples fleeing the effects of climate change in their homelands. There was also a series of earthquakes from around 1225 to 1175 BCE. These, together with the famines and droughts and the cutting off of international trade routes, undermined the societies of the time and led to a widespread general collapse of civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean.

*

It was the striking parallels with our present situation that led me to Cline’s book. Climate change induced war in the Middle East explains Syria today, where the civil war started in 2012 after the worst drought in hundreds of years of records (according to NASA the worst drought in 900 years), and we have mass migration from the Middle East and the Sahel as a consequence of famine and drought. The only historical example of the collapse of a political system of great powers that are economically interdependent as a consequence of rapid climate change seems particularly relevant to the present. What was striking about the collapse was how fast it happened once the tipping point was reached.

One has to take care when extrapolating from the past to the present or the future. However, this history does bring one of the most important and salient issues currently facing us into focus, climate change and migration. In the world today there are no unpopulated inhabitable regions left, and those areas of low population density where migrants escaping state collapse might settle and rebuild are owned and controlled by other states that are not prepared to cede sovereignty. This makes forced migration a political issue, and today most people who leave their country of origin without a legal destination (with a visa or permit) due to conflict, war or persecution are cared for by the United Nations. According to the UNHCR in June 2017 there were 65.6 million forcibly displaced people, a record number, of whom 22.5 million were refugees.

The potential for climate change to cause large-scale and widespread displacement and migration has been recognised for many years, although the more alarmist numbers lack credibility. The Paris Agreement established a task force to develop recommendations on displacement, and an earlier draft included the creation of a coordination facility with more powers, which was removed in the last days of the summit. Regardless of how seriously one takes the risk of climate change, the precautionary principle suggests that the links between climate change, displacement and migration need to be better understood and international and national policy responses better coordinated. There are straightforward responses to climate change that would allow people to adapt and stay in place, like irrigation or changing crops and repairing damaged infrastructure after storms and floods, but rapid change would bring many challenges and potentially many victims.

*

The evidence that cities are more productive, more inventive, and have higher incomes and better outcomes for their inhabitants is overwhelming, and larger cities have more of these than smaller ones. This leads to the view that cities are the greatest invention of humanity, because they are the necessary enabler of the stability, technology and culture that progress depends on. At a time of rapid urbanization, when the majority of the world’s population for the first time live in cities, a narrative that emphasises the beneficial role of cities and urbanization has great appeal. Therefore a book that challenges this view is highly unusual and very distinctive.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017) by James Scott challenges this conventional view, and rethinks the origins of civilization and the development of society in Mesopotamia, which is the geographical focus of the book. He takes a new look at the implications of the historical change from hunting and gathering to farming and the cultivation of crops and livestock. Scott is a political scientist who challenges orthodoxy and the narrative of progress, arguing the foundation of early states was not consent but violence, their rise led to a decline in living standards and less healthy populations, and they all eventually collapsed.

Scott argues that the conventional view of the history of humanity is fundamentally wrong in certain key respects, and bases his argument on a wide range of recent research. He does not claim that the discovery of fire and later the change from hunting and gathering to farming, and eventually industrialization and the development of modern society, are not transformational, because obviously they are, but he does claim that there were unintended and misunderstood consequences when we changed from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to farming. This is not a weak argument, there are many facts from many places around the world that support his view that this progress did not come without costs, and his book collects evidence not just from history and archaeology but also from fields as diverse as epidemiology, biology, demography, geography and climate science to support his view.

Neolithic villages were often abandoned, it is thought because of endemic disease caused by their unsanitary conditions. Their people were less healthy than hunter-gathers because their diet was more restricted and the work harder and more repetitive. However, sedentary farming allowed much higher fertility rates than hunter gathering, and over time higher fertility allowed populations to increase. Eventually economic and demographic conditions were right for the emergence of city states and the seizing of power by their leaders. Scott believes this happened around 3,500 BCE, in the flat wetlands of the Fertile Crescent, and it was due to the link between food production and the development of state power.

Ancient city states were agricultural and dependent on cereals for food, like wheat and barley in Mesopotamia, millet in China, and maize in Mesoamerica. Cereals are easy to tax, they ripen at predictable times, the size of the harvest can be accurately assessed and the grain can be easily transported, stored and distributed in measured rations by weight and volume. Thus the early city states had tax collectors responsible for managing the harvest, its storage and distribution. It is much more difficult to tax merchants and trade, or crops that ripen slowly or can remain in the ground, like tubers. Significantly, the earliest (preserved) writing on clay tablets is for recording harvests and allotments. Scott argues that the state controlled food supply through taxation and producers became subjects, with the agricultural surplus used to feed the non-productive elites who emerged in this system, the priests and administrators, as well as the workers who did the harvesting and built the walls that surrounded their cities

Research by Tim Kohler and his colleagues on prehistoric inequality supports Scott in this. They studied 63 archaeological sites and estimated the levels of wealth inequality in the societies whose remains were dug up, by using the distributions of house sizes. The researchers suggested agriculture was to blame, because a nomadic lifestyle is cooperative and not conducive to wealth accumulation. After humans switched to farming people began to acquire material riches and inequality rose steadily with the shift to settled agriculture. In the Americas inequality levelled out after about 2,500 years, but inequality continued climbing for several millennia In Eurasia, which was richer in large mammals that could be domesticated. Horses and oxen greatly improved farm productivity, but livestock were mainly owned by the rich. 

Timothy A. Kohler, Michael E. Smith, Amy Bogaard, Gary M. Feinman et al., 2017. Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica. Nature 551:619-623.

Inequality was the outcome of slavery, because these were slave societies, which was the norm for agricultural economies for most of human history. Reversing conventional wisdom, Scott believes that the walls built around city states may have been to keep people in, so they could be controlled and compelled to work, rather than to keep others out. Wars were fought with smaller, weaker states to capture their people and add to the working population, and replace the many workers constantly lost through escape and mortality. With static technology, “The total population of a grain state, assuming it controlled sufficient fertile land, was a reliable, if not infallible, indicator of its relative wealth and military prowess.” Slavery maximized production and the agricultural surplus and “It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the centrality, in one form or another, of bondage in the development of the state”.

He argues the story of the development of city states is also a story about development of political elites in very specific locations, where fertile soil and river transport allowed concentration of people who could be forced to produce a grain surplus. The elite seize power when the opportunity arises from settled populations growing easily managed and taxed crops. They then control the labour and fertility of those populations to increase the yield of the crops their society depends on. His is a bleak picture, with these cities filled with slave or unpaid labour forced to toil in fields and workshops under constant supervision and the threat of punishment. On the other hand, many slaves ran away and had to be replaced, as they escaped to join the barbarian tribes who lived beyond the limited reach of the cities’ power. Also, over time slaves became citizens, as generations of surviving slaves became assimilated and often acquired new captives as slaves for themselves.

These ancient city states were fragile, and regularly went through collapses, and often a series of collapses. The Old Kingdom of Egypt collapsed around 2100 BCE and the Middle Kingdom around 1650 BCE, the Minoan palaces around 1450 BCE, and there was the twelfth century BCE when the Bronze Age came to an end due to climate change and other catastrophes, as argued by Cline. Whatever the reason, these early states did not survive permanently, with episodes of collapse punctuating their historical records. Three common reasons for collapse Scott gives are:

1.     The unhealthy environment, lack of sewerage and the consequent diseases. With urbanization came new infectious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and measles, and epidemics spread by transmission through trade and warfare as people moved from place to place.

2.     Deforestation caused by cutting down forests and excessive grazing by goats led to flooding and erosion, and with irrigation came salinity and declining yields.This also led to the drying out of the Middle East and climate change.

3.     Warfare between states and internal conflicts, with battles for succession, slave rebellions, civil wars and insurrections.

Scott sees collapse not as a disaster but as an opportunity, and this is where he rethinks the story of the origins of the state and the roots of civilization in the ruins of these cities. The oppressive state system is dismantled and the population disperses, redistributing itself across a wider territory. In the case of epidemics, flight and dispersion were the only options for the populace of an infected city. This dispersed population did not leave any records mainly because they were ungoverned, outside any city-state or grain empire and therefore not counted. They did not need the monumental architecture and clay tablets found in the ruins of the ancient cities, they were nomadic or semi-nomadic and their buildings were not made of stone. Because there are no records from these periods when people live outside city-states they are called dark ages, i.e. without information. “There may well be, then, a great deal to be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being. Much of the dispersion that characterises them is likely to be a flight from taxes, war, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription.”

Against the Grain is not just a rethinking of ancient history, it is also a re-evaluation of the state’s role in political thought. History has privileged states because they leave a record for archaeologists of ‘invariably state-centric texts: taxes, work units, tribute lists, royal genealogies, founding myths, laws’, while much of the world’s population, the ‘barbarians’, lived outside their borders, where they left little in the archaeological record of their activities, villages, culture and worldviews. Our understanding of early statecraft is about the management of large cities with a slave-based economy in fertile basins growing grain. In fact, during the first few thousand years of recorded history the majority of people have lived outside the borders of states. Scott’s view is that this barbarian age ended as recently as 400 years ago, when the power of the state finally became overwhelming, in part due to the invention of gunpowder.

Barbarian was the term used to describe people living outside the control of city states, despite the fact that they were varied and little more than loose assemblies of tribes. In Scott’s view barbarians and city states were dependent on each other, they rose and fell together, and he uses as examples the Huns and the Romans and the Sea People and Egyptians. For him the period of these early city states was a golden age for barbarians, because they could prey on states as a resource for hunting or harvesting, or they could trade with them, or become mercenary warriors, and sometimes invaded and conquered to become the new ruling class.

Importantly, for the great part of recorded history the majority of people lived on the frontier, in the barbarian world, a far less regimented world than in the cities and developing nation states. Away from fertile river basins like Mesopotamia and Egypt, or China and India, were many other cultures and civilizations, many of which also existed for hundreds of years. Until quite recently there has always been a frontier where people could go to escape civilization, but the spread of nation states across the world means that frontier no longer exists.

*

It seems to me the lessons from the deep past on this are twofold. Firstly, state collapse in the past was often rapid, whether due to disease, climate change, civil war or natural disasters. The ancient agricultural empires based on fortified cities ended in periods where trade, technology and writing were lost, called dark ages because little archaeological information survives from those periods, and few survived more than a century or two. There appears to have been a tipping point at the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean when the effects of invasion, climate change and natural disasters on food supply caused the sudden collapse of a complex, interconnected civilization of eight kingdoms. That example, of a world with a number of deeply linked great powers, is particularly relevant I think, because the collapse of one weakens the others. This point is easily lost in a time of populist politics and economic transition.

In the past, when epidemics, climate change or state collapse displaced people, there was always the alternative of the frontier. People could leave the cities and become fishermen, foragers or hunters, pastoralists and herders, or start slash and burn farming (or more likely a combination of these). Today, however, there is no longer a frontier where people can go if their city or society collapses. In our world of nation-states and the associated doctrine of territorial integrity, a frontier beyond the reach of the power of the state no longer exists. (Space may be the new frontier, or possibly seasteading, but these are not viable options for large numbers of people).

Second, insurrection and revolution was often a cause collapse of state control in the deep past, and increased inequality made ancient societies and states less resilient, with insurrection and revolution more likely. In the Pueblo civilization in Mesoamerica there were several revolutions that followed droughts and food shortages between 500 and 1400 CE, just as droughts contributed to collapse in twelfth century Mesopotamia BCE and twenty-first century Syria today. State power and control of the population did not survive climate change in the ancient world. Applying history to present issues, or to the unfolding of the future, is always problematic. However, this history does provides a perspective on the fragility of civilization.

The political argument underlying Against the Grain is that the origins of the state have been misunderstood, because ancient city-states were ruled with coercion, not consent. Given these were slave societies that is not surprising, and Scott does not really challenge the contractual view of politics that emerged as private property, markets and parliaments became more common after the 16^th century with examples from ancient history. Also, there are two other significant factors the modern world has that the ancient world lacked.

The modern nation state has a far more extensive and effective range of powers and resources, both coercive and civil, than city-states ever had. Collapse is much less probable, and some causes like disease and natural disaster no longer apply because the state is expected to deal with them. What would most threaten collapse today is severe disruption to food supply. On the other hand, without a frontier to disappear into, malcontents, misfits and others likely to oppose the state have nowhere to go, and in many places the state is becoming more authoritarian and coercive over time.

The other key point of difference between now and the deep past is the level of technology. On one level this is obvious, but technology can addresses fragility in many ways. For example, high-tech foods such as home grown meat and local food production are in the early stages of development. Local food is taking off in many major cities, like the Square Roots container farms in New York. If the most likely cause of a contemporary collapse is food shortages then technology is an answer. A similar argument can be made for technologies like carbon capture (e.g. Climeworks) and geoengineering.

The idea that the role of ‘barbarians’ living outside city-states on the frontier has been misunderstood and downplayed because these people left little behind that can be studied, like stone monuments and cay tablets, seems right. In Scott’s view this was the great majority of people for most of history, and he portrays the deep past as a mixture of powerful cities with substantial populations of up to 50,000 people, dominated by an elite of priests and administrators, and the egalitarian and cooperative cultures found in less settled cultures. The ancient cities were located in fertile river basins where the rivers provided transport and an agricultural surplus could be produced by a slave or servile population. Only grain crops like wheat and barley in Mesopotamia, millet in China and maize in Mesoamerica allowed this surplus to be controlled by the elite. Beyond these specific locations was the frontier, which was nonetheless strongly connected to the cities by trade, particularly in slaves, and commerce.

Scott's view of history has these two distinct populations of people. One lives in a heirarchical, highly regulated  urban environment with a restricted diet and repetitive work. The other lives in a more cooperative and egalitarian culture, learns many diverse skills to build, hunt and cook, has a varied diet and significant free time. Some things never change.