The Singularity Breaks Ideologies

An ideology is a fixed bundle of positions that travel together. Knowing where someone stands on taxation lets you predict, with reasonable accuracy, where they stand on immigration, on defence, on drug policy — questions that have no logical connection to taxation whatsoever.

That bundling is not irrational. It is an enormous saving. Nobody can research forty policy areas, so we adopt a package assembled by people who have, and the package is usually coherent enough to be a decent proxy.

But the saving only works while the underlying conditions hold still long enough for the bundle to keep making sense. And that is the assumption technological acceleration is destroying.

Why Bundles Decohere

The positions in an ideological package are held together by a set of background facts about how the world works: what labour is worth, what scarcity looks like, what a firm is, what a border can control, what information costs.

Change those facts fast enough and the bundle comes apart. Positions that belonged together no longer do. Someone holding the full package finds himself defending two things that have quietly become incompatible, without any change in his own reasoning — the world moved underneath the positions.

We are watching this happen. Automation is separating "pro-worker" from "pro-employment." Artificial intelligence is separating "pro-innovation" from "pro-market," since the innovation now tends toward concentration rather than competition. Cheap synthetic media is separating "pro-free-speech" from "pro-open-discourse." In each case a coalition that made sense for a century is being pulled apart by a change in the underlying technology, not by anyone's argument.

Why This Is Worse for Parties Than for People

An individual can notice the incoherence and update. It is uncomfortable, but people do change their minds when the facts change.

A party cannot. A party is an institution with a membership, a donor base, a media apparatus, and a brand — all of which are invested in the bundle as it stands. Its incentive is to hold the coalition together, which means insisting that the positions still belong together long after they have stopped doing so.

So the party system does not merely fail to track the change. It actively suppresses the recognition of it, because recognising it would dissolve the coalition that the institution exists to maintain.

The Conclusion

The party system, organising politics around two fixed ideological packages, was a poor instrument for the last hundred years. Under rapid technological change it is worse than poor: it is actively misleading, because it forces every new question into categories that were built for a world that no longer exists.

The method is simply wrong. We have to part ways with ideologies and treat each problem on its own terms — which is not a plea for centrism or moderation, both of which are just further positions on the same discredited axis. It is a claim that the axis itself has stopped carrying information.

And that is another argument for deciding issues directly. A system that votes on questions one at a time does not need the bundle. It has no coalition to preserve, no brand to protect, and no reason to insist that your view on artificial intelligence should follow from your view on taxation.

I recorded this note twice, some time apart, without remembering the first attempt — which is either evidence that the idea kept bothering me, or that I should keep better notes.