The Global Powers of the Future

Attention is the new real estate.
Demand is the new oil.
The smartphone is the new pipeline.

…

In feudalism, lack of technological advancement meant a zero-sum game in which land ownership was the only source of wealth [1]. In mercantilism, a positive-sum game (trade) was played by zero-sum players (kings) using force to own wealth-generating trade routes. In industrialism, machines are used to finally enable domestic value production, and in globalism, domestic saturation is overcome by creating foreing consumers [1].

Global powers shaped around owning the assets with the highest ROI: land in feudalism, trade routes in mercantilism, factories in industrialism and distribution in globalism.

Violence shaped itself around seizing and maintaining ownership of those assets: armies in feudalism, navies in mercantilism, armies again in industrialism and “protection forces” in globalism.

What’s next?

“The rise of mental labor over physical labor reduces returns to conquering people and territories.” – Naval Ravikant [2]

Not everything will change. Servers need energy, developers need food, and as Conrad Bastable noted in [1], feudalism, mercantilism, industrialism and globalism can coexist as multiple layers of the same present.

But something will change: the highest ROI-generating assets will be different, violence will be less effective in seizing them, so new strategies have to be used.

In the past, the highest ROI assets could be seized through violence. Blood and iron got you land, navies got you trade routes, tanks got you factories and aircraft carriers got you oil. Today, much less so.

The new wars are not fought with armies (thought they might still be needed for defense purpose). Financial schemes attract foreign investments and tax cuts attract companies.

Modern trade routes

One of the new trade routes is access to founders (being able to buy the highest-ROI assets: startups). Silicon Valley flourished for sitting on top of it.

Tech entrepreneurs are like modern Columbuses, sailing into the unknown, hoping to discover a new trade route to users, to buy attention for cheap and resell it somewhere else for $$ – like the Dutch did with spices.

Modern global powers

Attention is the new real estate.
Demand is the new oil.
The smartphone is the new pipeline.

The most important predictor of future success of a country has always been probably ownership of the highest ROI-generating asset.

If I had to bet on which will be the global powers of the 21st century, I would put my money on the countries incorporating the companies owning attention, demand and smartphone production. The US and China, obviously. This bodes badly for Europe, unless drastic changes are made soon.

(If attention is the new high-ROI real estate and land eventually becomes a nice-to-have, does it mean that companies such as Facebook have a sit at the table of Global Powers now? An exaggeration, clearly, but we already had at least one non-country Global Power – The Dutch West India Company).

In particular, I’d watch closely robot production. Citizens all around the first world are worrying about the jobs which will be displaced by robots. However, the nations who are thinking about how to implement Universal Basic Income (UBI) got their priorities wrong. If jobs will be displaced by AI & robots, countries should focus on getting these technologies and the people who can make them. Otherwise they will be left without any high-ROI generating asset to pay for their UBI schemes.

As it has always been and will always be, those who prosper are those who focus on owning the highest ROI-producing asset.