Daily Balajisms - Bright Sun vs Black Mirror

The ascending world is rising with tech, the declining world resents tech.

Balaji Srinivasan explains that he no longer refers to countries as developed and developing, but he prefers the term ascending and declining countries. We need to see inequality as dynamic.

The West is increasingly technologically conservative, because the old East Coast elites are resentful towards the new elites of technology entrepreneurs. These netocrats are often young immigrant founders from all around the world.

Balaji contrasts the Black Mirror vision of a dystopian future of the declining world (where the technology disrupts the supposed harmony of the idealized present) to the Bright Sun vision of an ascending world, represented by global media content like the Indian movie Super 30.

Balaji @balajis

This trailer for Super 30 is worth watching to understand what's happening in India. It's a rising civilization.

youtube.comSuper 30 | Official Trailer | Hrithik Roshan | Vikas Bahl | July 12Presenting the official trailer of “Super 30”.#Super30 is based on the remarkable true life story of India’s genius mathematician Anand Kumar who was born in...

There are rare cases of technologically progressive movies coming from the West, like Limitless and the Limitless series.

Internet and technology more broadly changed the old division of countries into developed and developing ones. That division implied a certain stasis, as Peter Thiel says. It assumed developed countries have already reached their destiny, and there is not much they need to change internally. Only lecture poorer countries on climate and gender, provide technical assistance and development aid.

A metaphor of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset comes to mind. A fixed mindset prevents curiosity and tends to foster zero-sum and transactional thinking. A growth mindset, a belief that a pie can grow for all, encourages positive-sum thinking of technological transcendence.

But innovations like Ushahidi and M-Pesa, that came from Kenya showed that even countries with lower income and younger populations can leap-frog Western countries in terms of technology. Many people in Africa didn’t own a landline phone and went straight to mobile phones. The same is true with retail banks and plastic debit cards. Kenyans, since 2007, pay with their phones. M-Pesa was scaled to other countries, even briefly to places like Albania.

This decade, it's quite likely we will see similar leapfrogging in web3 and ecommerce. Crypto is very popular in Nigeria and Kenya. And recently Elon Musk, himself a South African, praised a Chinese WeChat as an inspiration for Twitter. Because WeChat is not just a platform, but a whole ecosystem of services. People literally live on WeChat.

India has overtaken the UK, and has the third largest number of tech unicorns, after the US and China.

We can expect the future services that leapfrog the established Western players to come either from the Centralized East (China) or from the Decentralized West - a truly global internet as a torchbearer of the Western ideals of freedom and prosperity.

Tech progress is hindered by outdated regulation and “empty suits” – anonymous, unelected and unfireable bureaucrats without skin in the game. They need to be challenged by thousands of stories like Dallas Buyers Club, Ghostbusters or House of Cards. Movies with rare depiction of evil regulators, journalists, politicians and activists. We need smart regulators and citizen journalists to unlock longevity.

Hollywood will get disrupted by decentralized AI, like Stable Diffusion, that will allow the whole world to tell a personal unique story. Creators will be gradually replaced by narrators.

Playground AI produced a picture for this article - bright sun rising on the ascending world vs sun setting on the black mirror declining world.

Balaji says, that a difference between a marketing pitch and a story is, that a story has an evil guy in it. Decentralized AI as the perfect logos, combined with the pathos of artists, and new ways of financing art with web3, will enable new mythos to arise.

New myths of Bright Sun for tech-progressive tribes will replace the broken and boring Black Mirrors of the old establishment.

And they will bootstrap a definite and optimistic future, as Peter Thiel would say.

A future where longevity, and what Balaji calls “practical miracles”, like curing blindness, become real.