Christopher Wink

The Rise and Decline of Nations

Coalitions strengthen a nation, and then strangle it whole.

Or so it’s been argued. In his influential 1982 political treatise called The Rise and Decline of Nations, political scientist Mancur Olson (1932-1998) builds on his earlier work on collective action to argue that stable societies tend to accumulate powerful special-interest groups over time, which in turn create institutional sclerosis.

These groups—unions, industry associations and other lobbying blocs—develop to protect their members’ economic rents, but their growing influence eventually stifles innovation, efficiency and long-term economic growth. Olson argues that this “accumulation of distributional coalitions” explains why some rich nations stagnate while others surge ahead. Post-war Germany and Japan, having lost these entrenched coalitions due to military defeat, grew rapidly in contrast to countries like the UK or the US, which retained their institutional inertia. I share notes from the book below.

Improve not just your life span, but your health span too

Today’s medical and pharmacological systems have been successful in responding to trauma — reducing childhood mortality and fatalities from any number of catastrophes.

But as we live longer, more of us face chronic diseases that need more prevention, sometimes decades before any given catastrophe. That’s “Medicine 3.0,” and before the systems ever get an overhaul, there are lessons for us. Improve not just life span, but health span.

That’s the argument of the popular 2022 book “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity” by physician and longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia. It’s no fad diets or quirky health plans. It’s a bit more like a contribution to health like what economist Emily Oster did for pregnancy — ripping through research to piece together a more commonsense and modern approach to the world.

Below I share a few changes I’m trying to incorporate into my lifestyle and other notes from the book.

Bloggers were once the creators, and there are lessons to learn

Nearly 50 philanthropists and funders squeezed into the breakout at the annual Media Impact Forum conference held at the National Constitution Center.

Our panel’s focus was on newsroom-creator relationships, which we at Technical.ly have dove into — both with creators, and with our own newsroom and, in a sense, because looking back my start as a “blogger” sure sounds a lot like the creators of 15 years ago. My moderator Liz Kelly Nelson wrote up more here on the conference here, and she previously wrote this piece which fits into my writing on ‘journalism strategy.’

Below I share a few notes from the discussion.

The Technological Republic by Alex Karp

The freedom, peace and security that allowed Silicon Valley to flourish was quietly underwritten by an American military that these same Silicon Valley technologists are ambivalent about supporting.

Far from its origins in the Second World War, Silicon Valley focused on consumer technology, which gave it no greater ideal than profit and comfort. This must change, or so argues Alex Karp, the cofounder-CEO of the controversial defense contractor Palantir Technologies, in his new book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”

Why, asks Karp, are technologists and knowledge workers ambivalent about working to support invasive corporate advertising, but ardently opposed to (militaristically) defending the Free World?

Writing of Silicon Valley engineers, but no doubt thinking also of millions of other complacent American professionals: “They exist in a cultural space that enjoys the protection of the American security umbrella, but are responsible for none of its costs.”

Palantir and Karp are entwined with a techno-libertarianism that sounds increasingly unhinged: company cofounder Peter Thiel just recently gave a bizarre interview with the New York Times in which, among other quirks, he gave a long, extended pause when he was asked whether humanity “should” survive. Karp might respond the strength and security of the United States affords a diverse array of perspectives, including eccentric billionaires.

Karp reminds, though: “The victors of history have a habit of growing complacent at precisely the wrong moment.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Builders Live @ Global Entrepreneurship Congress

The Global Entrepreneurship Congress was held in the United States for the first time since its founding back in 2009. This time in Indianapolis was a chance for me to get a sense of both a global conversation and a particularly American version.

I also got to host a pair of live recordings of Builders Live, Technical.ly’s regular conversation series on ecosystem building. Find my recap stories, and one of those interviews below:

We are a “storytelling animal”

Watch a human brain while engaged in a story and that brain looks as if that person is actually experiencing the story, rather than observing it.

That’s why stories are so sticky: why we eavesdrop on other stories, watch movies, listen to music, read novels and gossip. It’s a defining characteristic of humanity.

That’s the thrust of the 2012 book “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human,” written by professor Jonathan Gottschall. Though he argues examples of story’s power shows up all over the place, from effective marketing to biography books and new journalism, this book centers around fiction. Fiction appears better at convincing than nonfiction, exactly because fictional stories put us in a kind of trance, lowering our defenses. How nations and cities, friends and companies, organize are all reliant on stories. (I referenced Gottschall’s work in my recent ‘case for storytelling’ conference speech.)

“Story is the grease and the glue of society,” wrote one psychologist. “Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold”

However the future of fact-based storytelling goes, there appears to be no decline in story in our lives, as disinformation campaigns and bestselling video games both show. As one gamer puts it in the book: “the future looks bleak for reality.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

What is Fascism?

In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”

That sense is back, and since the word is used so often again, I wanted to return to a foundation. I didn’t have clear memories from my undergraduate political science reading so I picked up Fascism, an influential, well-regarded, thick, dense, 400+ page collection of writings on the topic published in 1995 and edited by Oxford political theorist Roger Griffin.

It was a slog but a firm foundation, in which the point is argued that the word was almost immediately stretched and packed with various meanings from its modern launch in the 1920s. In the simplest interpretation I can put together, fascism is a political strategy “idealizing abstraction” that uses power to protect a “mythic core” of kinship around a nation from out-groups.

Judging by the 400-page book, and oodles of dissertations and academic writing, that’s of course incomplete. I have more listed below for that matter. But it does arm me with a clearer picture, grounded in academia and without cartoonish exaggeration. Below I have other notes from the book for future reference.

How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

We assume more information means we’ll like people more because the people we know best tend to be people we know the most about. For ages, we’ve predicted more and faster information would end war. But we forget the many people whom we spend less time with once we learn more about them.

This is a very normal human process that has been industrialized by social media. The “online disinhibition effect,” in which we share more online so there’s no small talk like neighbors but rather ” “deep cascading dissimilarity.” This is Wilder’s sense of proximity.

That’s from Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, a new book from journalist Nicholas Carr. As Carr writes: “By turning us all in the media personalities, social media has also turned us all into rivals.”

Chart communications technologies over time, and Carr says they came in three stages. First, the machines were just carriers (telephones, telegraph, early internet), then they began to exert editorial influence by social media algorithms curating, and now AI threats to also create the content. This gets us more and more, but runs in the “naive view of information” problem that historian Noah Yuval Harari has also argued: “Information has no essential link to truth,” and so more information does not necessarily lead to more truth.

Carr’s Superbloom is enjoyable and enlightening. I recommend it. Below my notes for future reference.

Remarks: Tech meetups shape economic mobility

Below are my notes, and video, from the remarks I offered to kickoff the second day of our Technically Builders Conference, which also doubled as the closing of the 15th annual Philly Tech Week. It informed this story we published on Technically. My slides are here.

Starting in 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club was a regular gathering of tech enthusiasts in northern California.

The group was made famous for inspiring Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. But hundreds of computer clubs emerged around the country then. The Philadelphia Area Computer Society (PACS), for example, was first organized in spring 1976.

You don’t have to care about a few dozen computer nerds getting together 50 years ago. How they did has shaped the work we do, though, and has a few lessons for our future.

Appeal to the “movable middle,” says Human Rights Watch veteran leader

Shame the extremes with facts, not name calling or exaggeration. Appeal to the “movable middle.” Document. Build coalition methodically.

That’s the playbook outlined in Kenneth Roth’s new memoirs called Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. It’s drawn from his nearly 30-years as executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is someone I deeply admire.

The book offers an insider’s perspective on the organization’s strategies to expose and combat human rights abuses worldwide. Central themes include the use of “naming and shaming” to hold perpetrators accountable and the challenges of advocating for human rights in a complex geopolitical landscape.

Below I share notes for future reference.