3 articles
Every era has a dominant way of creating value, and a dominant form that organizes it. We treat the form we were born into as natural. It isn’t. It’s an artifact - shaped by the tools available at the time, and by the tools that were missing.
For most of human history, we lived in small groups. There were no tools to hold a larger group together: no writing, no roads, no clocks, no way to send a message faster than a horse. Centralization wasn’t possible because the infrastructure for it didn’t exist yet.
Every 80 years, America breaks and rebuilds itself. After the Revolution, after the Civil War, after World War II. Each time, the old structure collapses under its own weight and something new takes over. We're in that moment now.
