The Foundation Age
Overture to a new Century
If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.
— Hamlet
While 2020 passes, the 21st century finally begins. All it took was an act of God—a plague, furtive, but deadly—to reveal the specter of Late Modernity as the sclerotic farce that it’s been for some time now. The Mandate of Heaven has been revoked. The Firmament has been cracked open; temporal space is spreading out before us; new futures are possible again. This is our kairos, the opportune moment we’ve all been waiting for.
The challenge, of course, is that the energy unlocked by our new moment must be given direction. It must be molded, refined, and sculpted into a thing of incandescent Beauty. In short, the future must be architected.
As this most inauspicious year comes to an end, it is useful to try to make sense of our moment and its place in History; to peruse bygone eras in anticipation of the coming decades, and beyond.
It is fashionable these days to have a theory of change. Less fashionable—and far more useful—is developing a theory of history to provide oneself with the right context in which to become an actor. As Samo Burja states, while we may not all have theories of change, everybody has a theory of history, whether they are conscious of it or not. Most people believe history is merely cyclical; a recurring set of moments in which events are at once random and deterministic. Some believe history is a process of class warfare, and thus adopt Marxist ontology as a compass to the world. Others take more after Carlyle, believing great men shape History. Regardless, Man is a desiring species, and he needs a map with which to navigate his world. He needs a theory of history.
A Brief Theory of History
Historically, eras of great change have been synonymous with furious periods of foundation, and stasis with empire (see the late Roman Republic vs Augustus' Pax Romana). Let’s call a Foundation Age a period in history during which the world seems like it is remaking itself. In such times, those individuals who manage to wrestle with the tides of History and succeed in organizing the world of men are the world-historical figures we come to know. For our purposes, these individuals will be called Founders.
It would be extremely ignorant — maybe even insolent — to say that History only ebbs and flows from Foundation Age to Foundation Age. Still, if History is more than the study of political booms and busts, and is instead imbued with a sort of spirit, as Burckhardt tells us, then we can safely theorize as to what, in fact, it is trying to work out. Thus the Foundation Age theory of History is one which concerns itself with the motivating spirit of an Age, and those figures which embody that spirit and leverage it to scale their will. To state further, Foundation Age theory is the synthesis of Carlyle's Great Man theory (great men create history) and the more recent current of, let's say, Sociological History that colors our time (history creates "great men"). Before we dive into the nature of the theory, let's look at how it very reductively helps us model History thus far.
Roughly speaking, the First Foundation Age began with the first Singularity — the birth of Language — and culminated in the Neolithic Revolution, which engendered civilization itself. It was the arrival of man the world builder, eager to shape the world around him for purposes of survival. This era was displaced by the Second Foundation Age (roughly, the Bronze Age and Antiquity), which heralded the era of warrior kings and dynastic Founders—figures such as Menes and Ramses, Lycurgus and Leonidas, Cyrus and Darius, Solon and Pericles, Philip and Alexander, Romulus and Caesar—who founded and organized the world of men, and elevated civilization from mere sustenance to prolonged periods of culture and prosperity (but inevitable decline). This Age peaked with the formation of the Roman Empire. The fall of Rome was the end of a world as the empire was superseded by the Third Foundation Age in the form of the tumultuous Middle Ages, which saw the birth of Islam under Mohamed, and Christendom under the Franks. This was a time when the world went mad with lust for God, and the period peaked with the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration as man sought to subsume the divinity of Christ with his own burgeoning thirst for godhood. Modernity was born. Emphatically — and perhaps inevitably — the fourth and last Foundation Age was sparked by the death of God in the form of Louis XVI, and culminated in an American-Fukuyaman triumph of sorts by the end of WWII.
A few patterns begin to emerge when modeling history this way. First, each Foundation Age begins with an Idea — the spirit, so to speak, which brims within the people of that age — and ends when that idea reaches its absolute realization. This shouldn't be a surprise, as most people—even us exalted Moderns—are a product of our times. People say this phrase often, but spend little time untangling what it means. And what it really means is precisely that our time is massaged into shape by a set of ideas, some competing, others congealing, which are nested within a meta Idea that frames the actions of men and the events which surround them. For instance, an American millennial living in 2020 is the product of a Neoliberal, techno-capitalistic system operating under a set of other ideas (Liberalism, Progress, Equality), which themselves are subject to some Meta-Idea (Rational Man's Individual Sovereignty) organizing the whole modus operandi of his society. For purposes of illustration, let’s take a deeper look at this Idea—Rational Man's Individual Sovereignty—which arguably colored the Fourth Foundation Age.
One could say that the Fourth Foundation Age began, as Camus so aptly captured in The Rebel, when Robespierre’s precocious Dark Angel, Saint -Just, gave a rousing speech in the Assembly calling not for the expulsion of the Crown, but the definitive capital punishment of Louis XVI. His words rang with the self righteousness of prophets:
To determine the principle in virtue of which the accused is perhaps to die, is to determine the principle by which the society that judges him lives.
While Democracy was already alive and well in America at the time, it was an idea which shared legitimacy with Monarchy. However the Saint-Just moment made the claim that no Monarchy could ever be legitimate; that every rational man was sovereign—as the Renaissance's humanism had tried to show—and that it was the sovereign People who spoke for God, if such a thing existed. In so doing, the Saint-Just moment lit up the canon that — despite the Napoleonic hiatus — would raze the kings of Europe from the world by the end of World War I. The American triumph, as it were, is a consequence of Europe’s civilizational apoptosis; a triumphant suicide.
“God is dead. We have killed him.”
This fate was further cemented by the end of WWII. As the million men armies of Hitler and Stalin competed to erect Hell on Earth in the Eastern Front, it was the logical conclusion of this Idea, the Saint-Just Principle, which was laying claim to the world: the idea that, by virtue of being the only sovereign being in a Godless world, man can bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth, even after having killed Him. Nazism and Communism, though wrapped in different arm bands, were manifestations of the same utopian pathology that had taken over the French in 1789. Barely 200 years later, Death had come to collect. It was there, in the wintery plains of Russia, in the monument to Death that is Stalingrad, that the largest battle of all time was fought. What were they really fighting for?
If WWII proved anything, it is that the sin of Rational Utopianism—a spirit which had motivated the age since Saint-Just—is in dreaming an unworthy dream because all pathological utopias are living deaths, frozen in time in their inert perfection. Regardless, in the ashes of Europe, it was the Americans who claimed the world. Perhaps they would achieve the Idea which first sparked in Saint-Just—the idea of a sovereign People immanentizing the Rational Kingdom at the End of History. For a while, it looked as though they would. No other state had ever held so much power. No other state had ever enjoyed so much wealth. Thanks to the vision of Kennedy, their last true statesman (if not in ability, then at least in spirit), American fingers were the first to sift through lunar sand.
Ad Astra
But just as it had begun, the Fourth Foundation Age ended with a regicide as Kennedy’s brains littered the streets of Dallas in 1963. Camelot was no more.
Through this rather rushed unfolding of the thread, we see that the world is in fact heavily indebted to the Ideal in symbiosis with the material forces that make up human experience. The tumult that overtook Europe, from the spark of the French Revolution to Hiroshima, was the inevitable result of a process of self determination made possible by the mimetic impulse which defines humanity. Indeed no theory of History can be said to be complete which does not factor, let alone believe in, human nature. Yet it is this alone which stands at the foundation. The fact that we are a desiring species. This alone makes Ideological contagion possible, which in turn materializes in our world through the deeds of men. This alone makes History possible.
From there, we can see a second pattern emerging from the Foundation Age Theory: the intrinsic permanence of violence. What is meant by violence here is not merely physical force and aggression, but rather conflict in all its manifestations. Miming Girard, the Ideological contagion made possible by desire inevitably leads to violence.
The notion that Golden Ages emerge from eras of relative peace stands in contrast to the record of history. The Athenian Golden Age was an era of extreme turbulence as Athens and Sparta vied for dominance of the Mediterranean. The Renaissance was characterized by an almost cartoonish violence, enabled as it was by the enormous wealth and opportunism of the Age of Discovery. Indeed, the genius of Da Vinci was not merely recognized in his paintings, but also the machines of war that he designed for the notoriously cruel Cesare Borgia.
In short, a Foundation Age is an unfolding of an Idea across history, which often leads to violence as ambitious individuals compete to manifest or challenge the Idea (knowingly or not), making them the "men of their times". History is not circular, as the Eastern faiths claim; nor is it merely linear, as Christianity first discovered; rather, History is a spiral (at times spiraling up, at others, spiraling down): a play set in motion by the desires of men, and their ability to scale such desires across time.
The Nature of a Foundation Age
While every Foundation Age begins with an Idea, it only comes of age with the marriage between that Idea — which is often brought about by the best Medium suited to transmit it — and, borrowing from Matt Clifford, a technology of ambition. A technology of ambition is any vehicle which allows the desiring and ambitious individuals of an era to adequately turn opportunity into wealth/power of any kind (individual or societal).
Language, which could roughly be called the first Idea—in Genesis, God himself speaks the world into existence—was transmitted through the Medium of writing, which was exported through the technology of ambition that is war. Historically, and up until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, war has been the favored technology of ambition for a young man with a few companions and a sword; enough to make one a lord. By marrying it with language, the early humans used war to give way to laws, which became the Medium through which civilization was spread (lord = law ward).
But to issue laws, you first had to win a kingdom. Problem is, when you have many ambitious men all seeking their own kingdoms, you get lots of blood (see Old Kingdom Egypt, pre-colonial West Africa, the Warring States period in China, late Republic Rome, the entire history of pre-modern Europe, etc.).
In conjunction with the Idea and a suitable technology of ambition, every great new Medium eventually creates a Foundation Age as talented people must master the Medium in order to compete for the glory and riches promised by the turbulence and open spaces of a world in the process of re-genesis. This, ultimately, leads to runaway mimetic violence. The French Revolution should be renamed the Writer's revolution, as the bulk of its most prominent figures, from Robespierre to Danton, were all masters of the dominant Medium of their time: writing/the press. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Louis' eventual tragic fate was debated and sealed long before his trial in pamphlets widely read by the masses.
To recap, a Foundation Age truly begins when an Idea, alongside the birth of a new Medium, is accompanied with an adequate technology of ambition, for this leads to new conduits for talented people's wills as they make violence against each other:
Rational Man’s Individual Sovereignty → Printing press → widespread publishing → pamphlets → “death to the King!” → French Revolution → War of the First Coalition → Napoleon.
Of course, in our modern world, war is no longer an adequate technology of ambition because mankind has the power to end the world. But violence always remains because every era has men of ambition, and these men forever have different points of view.
Glimpses of a Fifth Foundation Age
While 2020 has revealed to us the extent to which the Emperor has no clothes, we have yet to see a new Foundation Age manifest because the quintessential Medium of the 21st century has not quite been fully formed. It took hundreds of years before Gutenberg’s invention could be said to have caused Louis’ head to roll on the streets of Paris. However, the birth of the personal computer in the late 80’s, the internet less than a decade after (and now the rise of crypto) all signal what could be the birth of an entirely new Medium.
What the computer offered was a tool to compress the world, and the internet was the canvas upon which that tool was unleashed. All of a sudden, a 27-year old South African immigrant could launch an internet based banking system, strike it rich by 30, and use that money to build a private space program before turning 40. All of a sudden, a clever 19-year old who nerded out on the Iliad and studied Psychology could launch a program into the world to make the faces, names, and networks of 2 billion humans legible. These things would have never been possible just 20 years prior. What is Elon Musk if not a 21st century Magellan, blazing paths to the new New World? What does it mean that Mark Zuckerberg style himself as a 21st century Augustus?
Just like Augustus, Zuckerberg’s empire has had to wage war against the institutions that preceded it. In place of Egypt, Mark Anthony, and the Senate, Facebook has to contend with a resentful media establishment, public sentiment, and Senate hearings. Regardless of how you feel about it and how much you use it, there is no shutting Facebook off. The company has amassed an incredibly rare and valuable data set which cannot be replicated or destroyed. Zuckerberg’s end goal likely isn’t to make you click on ads; he just needs you to do that for a little longer so that he can bankroll the company’s future expansions.
Sic Parvis Magna. Big things always have small beginnings, and in the case of the computer, the internet, crypto and startups—things that have often been castigated as inconsequential toys—we are still very much at the beginning. But it should be clear to anyone with a discerning mind by now that things have started to get less trivial. What do I mean by this?
As stated above, Musk's story would have been impossible in any other time. A South African immigrant who strikes gold quickly enough to have the wealth needed to spend most of his peak life years master-minding an exit from Earth. Just 200 years ago, he would have likely had to seize a country to amass his personal capital, unless he was born into it (Caesar basically conquered Gaul just to get rid of his debts and buy himself Rome’s “crown”). And before doing that, he would have had to have earned some kind of patronage in an elite institution to earn the right of command. Only after that could he begin to indulge his fancy, and even then, he wouldn't have the right mediums through which to orchestrate his spacexodus.
In other words, powerful new Mediums drastically reduce the realm of impossibility across verticals (and time). This is what makes new horizons possible, nudging men of vision and ambition to seek Power. So in a world where one cannot seize a country for himself to pursue their desired ambitions, what does a post-modern Napoleon do? He founds a dynamic organization — specifically, a technology venture (startups or DAOs / crypto protocols). Because in our world, technology ventures (Ventures for short) are the only institutions through which individuals (especially Founders) can exercise maximal agency.
And what are these Ventures? Businesses? Yes, but that's surface level. Anybody can start a business. These institutions are suitable for business, but the best ones (the greatest of which are yet to come) are not merely businesses. Nor are they strictly financial, commercial, or economic in nature. Some will veer into the political, others, the military. What they are, fundamentally, is a way for individuals to leverage new Mediums to extend the agency of a focused collective.
Simply put, Ventures are the prime Technologies of Ambition in our time. A Venture is a conspiracy of individuals seeking to maximize their personal capital and power by pursuing radically ambitious goals. Sure, some of them claim to merely want to save the world, but even then, one needs power to do that. And so they form an institution which will enable them to achieve said ambitions.
The key to understanding Ventures is understanding what they are uniquely capable of doing. There is a reason SpaceX exists despite the fact that NASA is still around: because it is a manifestation of Musk's unbridled Will to Power. For Musk, who was already a centi-millionaire when he started SpaceX, there had to be infinitely easier ways to make a $Billion than going to Mars. In the face of a derelict NASA, Musk realized his desires to explore the stars would never be fulfilled, so he bet on and manifested his Will to Power. Thus Ventures are proto-empires: organizations uniquely designed to project the power of its founders (power here is described as the means to achieve an end).
Ventures themselves would be nothing special if we lived in a time of institutional strength. The robber barons of yore bring to mind our current crop of tech barons. But they lived during the birth of the Progressive era—a time when the US was still in its vigorous youth. While figures like J.P.Morgan came close to capturing key functions of the state, most of barons still had to compete with a formidable US government.
We do not live in such times. Against the vigor of Ventures, the American state can only reveal its own lethargic incompetence. Indeed in America, startup ventures are perhaps the only functioning institutions that remain, because its founders are the most sovereign and dynamic actors in American society. Across the board, every other institution is in crisis or largely vilified: housing, education, congress, the military, banking. Against that backdrop, Ventures call out to the most ambitious and adventurous, who see nothing but sclerosis and negligible gains in every other societal realm. There is no better way, in our time, for a 24 year old to wield the power to remake the world as he wills than through founding a new Venture. This is the first sign that we are living at the beginnings of a new Foundation Age.
In 2020, as all previous institutions have abdicated responsibility for the future, it is these Ventures — the 21st century’s technology of ambition — that have emerged as potential usurpers. The birth of one Apple every 20 years is a sign of economic health; the birth of five of them in less than a generation (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and Netflix were all founded in the span of 17 years) is a signal of green spaces for power accumulation. The ensuing instability that such change causes is tantamount to a recycling of power.
But we have yet to reach escape velocity; the upper limit of potential ventures has barely been scratched. This is largely because the tech world is still juvenile, stuck as it is in the intangible world of bits. Founders have yet to develop the taste for real, worldly ambition and power. No Foundation Age can happen unless the dominant representation of startup ventures as technology companies ends — a meaningless designation, for in the 21st century, every company will be technological in nature. Ventures are fundamentally highly scalable, sovereign, and agile institutions. They can be suitable for technology, but they are not merely technology projects. In fact, most do not invent any new technology; they merely scale distribution.
Software alone cannot achieve the true, material gains that are necessary for the next Foundation Age. Man does not live by "likes" and "email" alone. As the epicenter of tech enterprise creation moves from the developed world to the emerging world, where the tailwinds of wealth have not even blown yet—let alone slowed down—and where the challenges and opportunities are more grand, the Fifth Foundation Age will truly be afoot.
Final Implications
For evidence that the Foundation Age process has been escalating of late, look no further than the explosion of wealth from Venture founders over the last 25 years. Bezos is worth almost 20% of a Trillion Dollars. What's more, these fortunes are built in the blink of an eye. Wealth may not always be a true accounting proxy for value, but beyond a certain threshold, it certainly is a great proxy for power.
Instead of lazily reading this as another evidence of income inequality, the more potent and interesting reading of this shift — when extrapolated into the far future — is how the power-law nature of Ventures relative to global institutional sclerosis will create so many individuals as wealthy as entire states that an era of Caesarism will erupt, ushering a world where private citizens can direct the state towards different ends. Beyond that, Founders might be tempted to establish their own principalities — if not on Earth, then certainly in Space. In the wake of 2020, this, it seems, is the Idea of our new Age. The world is sure to become a laboratory for world building.
If you doubt this is where all this is heading, look no further than the Musk and Bezos space rivalry. Very few people have perused the implications of individual citizens creating private military programs—indeed what are SpaceX and Blue Origin if not personal nuclear arsenals? Students of history will see the facile, if over-indulgent parallels between Musk/Bezos and Sulla/Marius: men of immense power and ambition, living in declining empires and times of unrelenting crisis, each vying for some form of eternal personal glory. Can any one of us be sure that either Musk or Bezos will let some pencil pusher with no skin in the game run their space colonies once they get there? And even if they fail, the damage is already done; they will have raised the aspirations of future founders with similar temperaments, talents, and ambition, just as the struggle between Sulla and Marius gave way to the generation of Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Cato, and Cicero.
The generation of Founders coming of age today — raised by the internet and learning from their predecessors — will realize, if they haven’t already, that Ventures are the ultimate leverage this century for the truly ambitious. As the Fifth Foundation Age erupts and the historical flywheel is underway, we will start to see Founders attacking spaces that were previously only the domain of the state. The first Trillionaire will not build his wealth selling you the iPhone 300 or another gadget; he will be settling cloud cities on Venus. He will be more Lorenzo de Medici than Steve Jobs.
So what will the most ambitious among us do in our times? They will be Founders. They will leverage the new Mediums (the internet, the computer, crypto) and the technology of ambition (Venture) of their era to unleash themselves upon the world, remaking it as they will. In fact, they must, for they live in a Foundation Age, and there will be no rest for striving and timid souls alike.