Philosophical commentary on Hayek, networks, and power dynamics

capitals and traditional power centers into a world where their ideas and policies constantly fail. They don’t understand networks; never will. At the same time a new, rising generation lashes us into connected and amazing meshes. We welcome this connection. Centered in Menlo Park or Seattle or Zhonguancun or Shenzhen, these figures understand networks perfectly, but not yet much else. Old and new, each group works anyhow on our freedom. We are pulled dangerously between these forces. Problems seem to get worse. What we need to find is a way out of this trap. A fusion. A blended sensibility of both the edgiest ideas of connection and the most unshakeable and brutal and inarguable requirements of power. This is the Seventh Sense. It is our only possible protection. 5. In the last century, as the economist Fredrich Hayek watched Europe both struggle against and flirt with the then-appealing ideas of Nazi and Soviet socialism, he marked the fundamental conflict of his age as the one between individual liberty and central planning. Recall that at that moment in history, the 1930s, America and much of Europe were in deep depression, their political systems struggling. The rapid growth in the USSR and Germany looked awfully appealing to many. The political stability of totalitarian ideologis had a certain placid charm in some quarters. But, Europe was, Hayek argued, walking nothing less than a road back to serfdom. Was man happier, better off, more justly fulfilled by the chaos of a market and democracy or in the orderly machine of authority, of clicking heels and machines? Hayek voted with his feet. He fled the Nazis in 1938, and he worried for the rest of his life that in the attempt to manage the risks of free markets and minds, the Europe he loved was running into socialism. “Is there a greater tragedy imaginable,” Hayek wrote, “than that we should unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?”32 Hayek thought two safety catches of might protect mankind from the totalizing control habits of Soviet-style thinking: First, an unkillable human instinct for individual freedom, the squirm humans have always shown under the boot of too much authority. And, a second protection he thought, would be the really terrible, absurd inefficiency of centrally planned systems. No bureaucrat, no economist, could possibly out-perform the productive chaos of a market or an election in the long run Hayek felt. Finding the right price, matching supply and demand - it was impossible to think this could be done by some technocrat in a room somwhwere. This was what markets were for. This is how they encouraged profit, free-thinking, invention. Chuchill’s famous line, that “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others,” contained a certain truth: civilizations, yoked by democratic and market rules, reached more durable outcomes than despots or oligarchs. Hayek, as we look at his judgment now, was correct. People wanted to be free; the dream of central planning collapsed under its own weight with the USSR in 1989, 32 “Is there a greater tragedy”: F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 32 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018264