The Tipping Point

How Decentralization Won an Election

Earlier this year I wrote a post called “The Future of Media”, in which I outlined how media in general is becoming more decentralized.

As a former screenwriter, I mostly focused on the entertainment industry, and how the attention economy is going in one direction: personalized.

But at the time this was all hypothetical. A trend based on the data I had available; both my own experience, and the research I could find online.

But this past election showed me beyond a doubt we’ve passed the tipping point. Decentralized media is officially more powerful than centralized media.

There are a few reasons for this.

The Macro

The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.

—Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms 220-280 AD

We are entering a period of decentralization. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, its just where we are on the macro-economic, cultural cycle.

Peak centralization in America was just following WWII. Let’s call it 1946.

The federal government took a leading role in mobilizing resources, directing production, and managing the economy during the war effort.

This centralization continued to some extent in the immediate post-war period, with government policies playing a crucial role in economic expansion, such as the GI Bill, and the Taft Hartley Act of 1947.

In the same year of 1947, the transistor was invented at Bell Labs, itself a case study of the benefits of centralization

Bell Labs was a product of AT&T's monopoly in the telecom industry, such monopoly status allowing AT&T to invest heavily in long-term, fundamental research without immediate profit pressures.

The transistor, Information theory, the laser, Unix, the first binary digital computer, solar cells; these all came out of Bell Labs.

Even Apple, a paragon (at least in their branding) of individuality, based their headquarters in Cupertino off of the Bell Labs design which allowed for people of different disciplines to run into each other and talk about what they were working on.

But if 1946 was peak centralization, we have been on the path to de-centralization ever since.

First came personal computers, which decentralized computing power from mainframes to individual users.

Then the creation and widespread adoption of the Internet in the 1990s decentralized information sharing and communication on a global scale.

Then Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Networks like BitTorrent enabled decentralized file sharing without relying on central servers.

Which leads us to where we are now. The age of podcasts, social media, Blockchain, and eventually, decentralized finance. But that’s a story for another article.

What I really want to double click on is podcasts and social media, since they are here to stay and already having an out sized impact.

Go Direct

PR guru and all around interesting person Lulu Cheng Meservey has been touting this ethos since before Anduril was cool.

Her whole point is you can’t trust the legacy media to report on your startup or project in a favorable light anymore.

You’re outsourcing your message to someone who doesn’t really understand it, might not agree with it, and has their own narrative they would like to push to “have an impact”.

What’s more is the legacy media industry is dying, and they are being forced to abandon any semblance of responsiblity in an effort to generate clicks to sell ad space. Some publications are baldly partisan, but others just can’t afford to have integrity.

So the only solution is to go direct. Go to where your audience hangs out and start a channel. The medium can differ. A blog, a podcast, a presence on social media, YouTube. It doens’t really matter.

The point is, you have to go where people are already hanging out, and be there evangelist of your message directly.

So why does this matter?

The Podcast Election

We found out this year that 𝕏, which has long been criticized as being a conservative bubble full of trolls and racists, was actually the signal, not the noise.

We found out that Polymarket, which had Trump winning based on a 69% margin, was more reliable than the legacy media polls, which had the race at a dead heat.

We found out that well reasoned musings on Substack were a more reliable metric to go by, than the official statements of the legacy press and professional politicians.

And we found out that people get their information by listening directly to the source, and forming their own conclusions.

But what drove people there in the first place?

Imagine for me, if you will, you are living at the time of peak centralization.

The economy has been terrible. You still remember the horrors of the first World War. You’re nervous you might be laid off from your job. You’ve already sold your car to cover debts.

Now imagine the president, yes the president of the United States, comes on the radio to tell you his plan for the future in a long form radio transmission.

You and your family crowd around the small American Philco you bought when times were good and listen. And you are comforted. You allow yourself to feel hope for the future.

That’s what happened this past election cycle. You had one candidate speaking to the people of this country, in long format (often for over an hour at a time), answering tough questions in well thought out ways, and articulating a plan he wanted to enact to fix the problems we face.

And you had another candidate who spoke at people.

One who couldn’t pinpoint the root causes people had been facing for the previous few years, or articulate a vision for the future. A candidate who had a nervous tick of laughing in the middle of sentences, and rarely came across as authentic.

What happened in this election is the macro trend of decentralized media allowed for the electorate to make a informed decision after hearing from both candidates in an unencumbered way.

What’s Next?

Society is a fractal of the people who live in it. And just like genes are perpetrated because those who carry those genes are successful in some way, societies also have genes. They’re called “memes”.

Yes before Kermit the Frog drinking tea, Richard Dawkins, the acclaimed evolutionary biologist, popularized the term in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Memes, according Dawkins, are “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” In a word, a meme is an idea.

Memes replicate themselves by spreading from person to person through imitation or copying. As memes spread, they can change or be combined with other memes.

Some memes are more successful at replicating than others, leading to a form of cultural natural selection.

And lastly, memes can spread regardless of whether they benefit the genetic fitness of their host.

This last part is critical to understand, because just like genetic genes:

“the struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.”

The term Equity is a meme in the same way the term Merit is a meme.

And what we have learned from this election is that the memes of:

1. Merit over Equity

2. Freedom over the nanny state

3. Entrepreneurship over bureaucracy

4. And free speech over censorship

have been embraced, and latter memes have been thoroughly repudiated.

The vast majority of the country chose to be sovereign citizens who would not be told what to say, do, or think, from a monolithic, centralized polity.

They spoke to their friends, their neighbors, their church members, and they listened to the people running for positions of power themselves from decentralized media platforms.

And the results speak for themselves.

The work is just beginning, but it begins with tremendous optimism that we begin.