The Future Belongs To The WeirdThis essay is telescopic. It can shrink or expand, depending on how much attention you are willing to give.<br>This is the original version (2785 words). Show other sizes.<br>SmallMediumLarge

The Future Belongs To The Weird<br>or the gospel for those out of distribution

If you were born in pre-modern times, the last thing you wanted to be was weird. Because the most likely outcome of being weird was dying an untimely and painful death. Unusually weak? They will not want to feed you. Unusually strong? They will send you to fight an impossible war. Unusually clever? They will accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake. Yes, there were some exceptions (for example, "freaks" kept as curiosities by the kings), but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed.

The European pre-modernity was not unique in this way. Every age and culture seemed to find its own way of punishing those who had an uncontrolled tendency to look or behave out of distribution. Thus trying your best to blend in, concealing your spiky sides, behaving in predictably average ways and staying "on rails" used to be the most rational life strategy for the vast majority of people who have ever lived.

To be fair, most cultures also developed deliberate valves and institutional escape hatches for excess weirdness. These valves could be broadly categorized into 3 types: temporal, spatial and role-based. Temporal ones were restricted to certain times of the year: for example, during the Dionysian orgies the usual societal rails and expectations were suspended. Then the spatial valves were about the designated areas where you could escape the system: bugger off into the wilderness or sail to the New World and do what you want. Temporal and spatial escape hatches can often be combined for maximum containment: Burning Man is both a time and a place. And then there were role-based escape hatches: the village idiot, the king's jester, untouchable castes or certain kinds of monks. If you needed to only escape the system occasionally - go knock yourself out at a festival. If you were not ready to comply with the societal rails on a permanent basis - become a hermit. Or a pirate. Or run away with the circus. Or go found a new colony (because in those wild and beautiful days the frontier was still endless and order-abiding societal enclaves were still an exception in the vast, scary, free-for-all dance of mother nature). Staying normal was expected, and rational. Escaping the system was rare and dangerous and irrational, but possible and somewhat accepted.

But slowly, and then suddenly, the frontier shrank, the industrial models of production and education marched across the Earth, and the situation changed for the weird ones. In some ways it got better, obviously: these days almost nobody gets literally burned at the stake for being too clever or contrarian (though recent outbursts of cancel culture got suspiciously close to the ways of the Inquisition). Overall, it's fair to say that the majority of the population is not facing the "don't be weird or die" dilemma.

Yet in other ways, the rails also got stronger and the escape hatches fewer. Skip college and your chances of getting past the automated CV filter are vanishingly small. Ruin your score with Meta and good luck ever really escaping the shadowban, no matter which country you try to reconnect from. Global institutions, global databases, global algorithms, global castaways. It's a lot harder these days to just "set sail to America and start a new life".

But I don't want to talk about the "evil system" here, for that has been talked about enough. Let us instead talk about how and why "the system" used to work and why its days may be numbered.

Before we speculate how the system may end, we have to try and understand how it began and what keeps it going. So why was it good to be normal in the first place?

Humans, like all life, are engaged in a constant (and ultimately hopeless) battle against the forces of chaos and confusion (a.k.a. the second law of thermodynamics). Evolution equipped her warrior children with various weapons. The hydra can regenerate. The virus can use other bodies to propagate its patterns. Our weapons of choice have been intellect and institutions. Intellect allows us to identify existing patterns in the environment and use them to our advantage.<br>Institutions allow us to effectively pool our individual agencies to propagate our own patterns across space and time. The main thing that you build institutions from is other humans. And so for other humans to be an effective building material, they need to be predictable and interchangeable: what you can predict - you can control. What you can predict - you can rely on and build from. The more reliable a component a human is - the easier it is to use them as a cog, a building block in an organisation (an army, a factory, a company, a church, a country)....