Riley Blackwell
I revere transitional periods. For the past six years, I’ve lived through my own liminal space—one which taught me to see change as sacred. Now, we’re collectively entering a profound new transition.
Though many experts have discussed the history of past transfers of intelligence and industry through the ages and empires, my perspective may be a bit more radical than the ones you’ll find on newsfeeds and usual social algorithms. Aside from pure intuition, that’s what drove me to start this newsletter:
At Kimiya, we explore the alchemical process that emerges from mixing social, technical, and economic elements—using critical research to understand how cultures morph, blend, and share their stories.
Over the past few years, I’ve watched countless hours of video essays and podcasts and barreled through audiobooks of commentary with attention-grabbing headlines on the “great wealth transfer,” potential collapse of economies, and the metaphysical. However, many of these give either a fantasy version of the future or a doom-and-gloom outlook for more views. Much of this attention-seeking content gives little for viewers to tangibly act on. This leaves a huge gap for those working on social change with a perspective, deeply held opinions, and a strong grasp of authentic storytelling to help bring it all together.
In each post, I’ll attempt to connect the dots through:
Interviews from maker spaces
Analysis of economic models
Breakthroughs shaping education, health, and energy
Maintaining an eye for nuance
If any of this sounds interesting, welcome! Stick around for more and share it with your friends!
It has been made abundantly clear that global systemic inequalities and social stagnation have brought us to the brink of collapse. Rampant, unchecked capitalism has led to the same real wages today as in the 1970s, and the people earning those wages feel nearly powerless under the boot of billionaires running around with chainsaws (literally), mucking through the Oval Office to try to save themselves, not the people, from an impending collapse.
So, if we’re transitioning to some other thing, we must have a vision for what that looks like and how to ease into it. Otherwise, we risk spinning our wheels into oblivion yet again. I can tell you one thing for certain: it won’t be network states bowing to leaders like Balaji Srinivasan, Elon Musk, or any of the Thiel acolytes despite their best efforts to spew nonsense into the tech sphere. Though they may be the catalyst for this change, there is better use in ignoring them altogether.
The near term may be incredibly difficult without social change.
Consuming enough tangible evidence of the exponential investments and advancements in industries like automation, AI, and quantum computing provides a unique case for the total decentralization of ideas and efforts in local to global economies.
To be clear, we know if any sort of collapse happens, it will do so on a global scale. So, while I’m in the US, this event is projected to be greater than the Great Depression and certainly far more impactful than the 2008 housing crisis if it does indeed occur.
Many experts I track optimistically project that we will be able to stave off this hardship until further automation, robotics, and AI create environments requiring us to work less or not at all. Frankly, I don’t see the changes happening fast enough. Job losses are already happening with massive gaps in engineering, just not being reported since most media outlets are bombarded by political nonsense each day. This is all by design.
Take, for example, this recent report from makers of ChatGPT, where OpenAI researchers show that a new SWE-Lancer model can meaningfully earn over $400,000 on freelance sites. This gets them closer to the $1M projection for AI agents. Then there’s this most recent Satya Nadella interview, whose new push is to define AGI, if at all (increasingly frustrated when asked the question), as a GDP growth rate of 10%. When the general public has little understanding that GDP doesn’t actually signal growth, this gets dangerous.
This, combined with daily news of otherworldly tech and science advancements that the average person (let alone professionals) cannot keep up with, makes for a very confusing outlook.
Thanks to frequent updates by brilliant news reporting from Kyla Scanlon and many other (now independent) career journalists and economists, a truthful account of the day’s nonsense is only a click away.
Unprecedented access to the truth becomes easier when you know where to look and who to trust (another topic I intend to explore). Still, it becomes more complicated as new executive orders clamp down on media outlets and internal processes.
Now that I have a rolling feed of truth, I’m free to conduct creative research to keep others both informed and to generate novel ideas consistently. This freedom is what I want to talk more about.
Personally, I’d love to reduce my use of algorithmic feeds since I understand the long-lasting damage they inflict on the psyche. That’s why I opened a public broadcast feed for those looking to stay up to date, free up some cognitive load, and have a similar urgency for knowledge as it happens.
We certainly saw a lot of weird things happen during the COVID-19 pandemic, from people wearing hazmat suits to the grocery store to restaurants building giant overhang shelters that ran off into streets. We collectively witnessed a society show up for its neighbors, with or without government handouts.
However, that felt like a trial period for what we were about to experience, which is why we must be better prepared.
That said, Gaya Herrington's 2020 Limits to Growth study shows a model that, if implemented properly and with care, is projected to put us on the right path. I have some accompanying ideas that connect the dots as we move in that direction.
For this reason, and thanks to various research I’ve conducted, I think the trajectory we could head toward is a resource-based economy (RBE) paired with ideas from the Library Economy movement. I’ve since shared this research in the Kimiya closed group, where we’ve been discussing this transition period to work toward more tangible solutions. You’re welcome to join us if any of this resonates with you!
A few things I’ve found have helped frame this transition:
Access > ownership
Ownership > hoarding
Abundance > growth-at-all-costs
Decentralization > centralization
These ideas culminate in an eventual world library through the advancement of automation, AI, blockchains, and eventual quantum expansion. One key reason Kimiya exists is to guide us through the friction we’ll tackle during this transition.
Key focuses here exist within highly efficient energy harvesting, localization efforts, maker spaces for access to DIY tooling, and an open, creative mind for wholesome neighborship. This transition calls for millions or even billions more hardware and software sensors on top of great social change through health and education overhauls. So when we start not by spending immense effort on a podcast or video series but instead getting out and talking to people actively making change now, we can tell authentic stories now rather than waiting for some magical restructuring. Understanding the right questions to ask and when will allow for opening the windows to new opportunities as we grow together will better represent this transition without framing it through a seemingly impossible utopian lens.
In the coming newsletters, we will examine how an RBE operates on a local and global level and the social changes that must occur to prevent the worst of a collapse.
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