Yusuke Narita v.s. Ken Suzuki Author of âDemocracy in the 22nd Centuryâ/ âSmooth Society and Its Enemiesâ talks about society in the 24th century.
This dialogue is a profound discussion of the structural challenges and future vision of contemporary society by two intellectuals who stand at the convergence point of social thought and philosophy of science. The main points of contention are as follows
- fragmentation and reintegration of academia:
- In response to the trend toward fragmentation in the social sciences since the 19th century, this article discusses the need to rethink society as a whole. It suggests the limitations of reductionist approaches and explores the possibility of applying complex systems theory and emergent concepts to social understanding.
- deconstruction of anthropocentrism:
- It critically examines the anthropocentrism assumed by conventional political and economic systems and presents a vision of a new social system that encompasses the entire ecosystem. This includes innovative ideas that extend the concepts of ownership and voting rights to non-human life forms.
- transformation of the site of intellectual production:
- The limitations of the university system and the possibilities for intellectual production beyond it are discussed. Here, we see a search for interdisciplinary and practical venues for the creation of knowledge.
- the conflict between thought and practice:
- We are deeply concerned with the relationship between theory and practice in social change. In particular, we offer a critique of the âsupremacy of practiceâ in contemporary society and a reassessment of the role of pure thinkers.
- contemporary criticism from a historical perspective:
- It relativizes contemporary professionalism with reference to the multifaceted work of 18th- and 19th-century thinkers and mid-20th-century scientists.
- vision of the future society:
- It explores the possibilities of new social systems that go beyond existing political and economic concepts and provides insight into the co-evolution of technological innovation and social institutions.
This dialogue can be appreciated as an intellectual endeavor that combines academic rigor and bold thought experimentation, and is oriented toward a fundamental restructuring of contemporary society. While emphasizing the importance of thought from a long-term perspective, the dialogue also refers to the difficulties of accepting innovative thought in the same period, and is highly suggestive from the perspective of the history of ideas.
tonghwi17 Yusuke Narita v.s. Ken Suzuki, author of âDemocracy in the 22nd Centuryâ/âThe Smooth Society and Its Enemiesâ talks about the society of the 24th century
I will try to keep it live as long as time permits~!
Lame Enemy
tonghwi17 space here
kensuzuki: I will have a talk with Yusuke Narita on 11/19 (Sat) from 11am at Twitter space. Subject, âThe author of âDemocracy in the 22nd Centuryâ/âThe Smooth Society and Its Enemiesâ talks about what the society of the 24th century will be like. â#Fungi Enemies https://x.com/i/spaces/1vaxr/i/spaces/1vAxRAekZjDJlâŚ
tonghwi17 Ken Suzuki (Suzuki): Today we would like to have a meeting to talk about the future, since we have each published a book about the future society. I met Mr. Narita in person when he was a freshman in college. Through a connection with my advisor, Takashi Ikegami, I wrote a book titled âNAM Generationâ published in 2001, in which I wrote an essay on PICSY, which Mr. Narita helped me with.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: After that, when Professor Aoki of Stanford University asked me to help the Tokyo Foundation launch the Virtual Currency Institute, I was asked to assist him. When I asked him if there was anyone good as a research assistant, Narita-san was the first person who came to my mind. It is no exaggeration to say that he has been driving my research ever since.
tonghwi17 Narita: I got involved in some dubious research and did a lot of things and was allowed to use that platform as I pleased. Suzuki: Thanks to Mr. Narita, interesting researchers came and went. Narita: I like the sterile atmosphere of such places where strange people gather, and I honestly donât know what is being created.
tonghwi17 Narita: But after a few decades of this, human connections and good soil have been created. But todayâs society is very worldly, so they donât really understand that kind of soil building and so on. Suzuki: For myself, with the publication of âThe Smooth Society and Its Enemies,â I was able to influence people in various fields like cognitive scientists, psychologists, and legal scholars,
tonghwi17 SUZUKI: Toyotaka Sakai, with whom I had a conversation yesterday, published a book titled âDoubting Majority Ruleâ as a result. This is connected to that kind of thing. Narita: Even a well-defined research institute, let alone the nukagoko where such things are born, cannot be maintained nowadays.
tonghwi17 Narita: There are a few groups that are envisioning doing something like that, but they donât last long term. If an organization like a publishing house, which is not a centennial organization, is going to have it, it will be run on a single-year budget, so it will only last a few years if the decision-making changes. It is difficult to create a place that will keep it for a decade.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: In the midst of all this, you have published your first book in Japanese, âDemocracy in the 22nd Centuryâ. I was surprised that Mr. Narita wrote a book that asks such a question to society. My impression of Mr. Narita when I was a university student was that he was a bit out of touch with the world, so I thought this book was getting closer to the world of the floating world.
tonghwi17 Narita: I wrote this book with the image of making a speech or making an agitation. It occurred to me to try to do something of the appealing type. Of course, Iâm thinking about it at the same time.
tonghwi17 SUZUKI: Any response? Narita: There are some small ripples and stirrings, such as young people trying to build a strange village or a community on the blockchain. This was always the goal. The development of some kind of independent thought, revolutionary thought, and digital democracy is an old issue,
tonghwi17 Narita: I did this as an experiment to see what would happen if I increased the number of destinations to reach by one or two digits.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: The book I wrote for 13 years from 2000 is âSmooth Society and Its Enemies,â and Narita-san gave me quite a variety of comments. Rather than writing the book on my own, I consider myself as one of the co-authors. I would like to know how you see it from your point of view.
tonghwi17 Narita: It was 10 years ago when I read the whole thing thoroughly, so my understanding now may be skewed, but the overall impression I remember is that the question is whether it is possible to think of society as itself. However, the overall impression I remember is that there is a question of whether it is possible to think of society as a thing in itself. Social scientists in the last 100 to 200 years have given up on thinking about human society,
tonghwi17 It became categorized and structured like law, economics, military, etc. In the 19th century, there were people like Political Economist, which in recent years In the 19th century, there were people like the Political Economist, but in recent years, they have been subdivided. It is a problem for society, science, culture, and business to think about it again as a big mass of society, and to try to integrate it, and that is what we are trying to do.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: That is certainly the case. Considering that various events are only one phenomenon of biological activities, even if there is a statistical universal, it is ultimately ad hoc. I think that the existing way of perceiving the study has become too unconventional and we cannot get out of it. The result could be an attempt to integrate the subdivisions.
tonghwi17 Narita: I am curious as to why Ken decided to turn towards society. Suzuki: At first, I felt more discomfort with society. Like the Berlin Wall. As a clue to thinking about it properly, I was simply shocked when I came into contact with physics in high school, and I thought that if I did physics, I might be able to find an answer to what I felt uncomfortable about.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: I thought, I could only do linear physics in high school, and when I entered university, I learned about the nonlinear world and entered the field of complex systems. I met an overwhelmingly weirdo named Takashi Ikegami, and I thought, âI donât know what heâs talking about,â but I found it interesting to study, and I wanted to think about social issues,
tonghwi17 Suzuki: I worked on life sciences and natural sciences. So, now that you mention it, I remember, I was originally more interested in society. Narita: Itâs an old debate whether we should connect society to individuals and events, but what makes you think we have to jump over that?
tonghwi17 Suzuki: Iâm looking for an explanatory principle for events somewhere, but in the world of complex systems, something happens that creates order out of complex interactions, and that is called emergence. In the world of complex systems, something like the creation of order out of complex interactions occurs, which is called emergence, and how to create multi-level emergence with many layers is being discussed in research such as artificial life. The world, too, has a layered structure,
tonghwi17 Suzuki: I see it as only a kind of processing, and that too is only generated in the end. I am not saying that it is right or wrong, but I am comfortable with that worldview. I felt uncomfortable with the fact that money has value in the first place, and I also felt uncomfortable with the idea that why should I obey those in power?
tonghwi17 Suzuki: I think he was looking for an explanatory principle to that.
tonghwi17 Narita: What percentage of the questions were answered by writing this book? Suzuki: While designing the monetary system in PICSY, the idea of a social security system was born, and many other discoveries were made while writing this book. Narita: On the contrary, is there a new enemy, Sense of wonder? Suzuki: I realized that Carl Schmidt was a difficult opponent.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: As I write, I donât feel like Iâm defeating Carl Schmitt at all. Another thing is that we have not gotten out of human supremacy at all. Why only humans have ownership of the economy, which includes the natural environment, is a mystery. As an extension of the collective knowledge of the stomach, we should give ownership to dolphins and other animals in the first place, as Dr. Suzuki wrote in his book
tonghwi17 Suzuki: was perceived as strange at the time, but not strange at all. I thought that non-human life forms should have the right to vote, but since they cannot vote, I wondered if they could also be considered as One of us/them by bringing the traits they have, etc. So, a molecular biologist and I have a supplement to the paperback edition of the book, âThe Internet of Cells.
tonghwi17 Suzuki:â Narita: What is defined in this book by the mechanism or implementation of Divicracy is a system in which the individual decides how to become a divisor. In other words, itâs predicated on decisions made by individuals, and PICSY.
tonghwi17 Narita: So I think it would be better to rather start up from the cell side to achieve what Kenâs concept wants to do. The discussion is likely to become more pointless, but I think itâs good even if it doesnât. Suzuki: Yes, thatâs right.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: In that sense, this book is trying to connect to the floating world in the first place because it is trying to challenge social implementation. However, because I was trying to do so, there were some contradictions between the concept and the implementation method in the book, and I felt some limitations while writing it.
tonghwi17 Narita: So, the way this book is written is to consider the current social system and then think about how to radically update it. It would be interesting to write another book like âBehind the Fame Enemyâ to show what happens when you create a system from nothing.
tonghwi17 SUZUKI: So I think it is transparent that you said you wrote for readers 300 years later, but you wrote for modern readers. If I had written it for the real readers 300 years from now, I really wouldnât know what I was talking about, so I donât think they would have read it. LOL!
tonghwi17 Narita: On a related point, the bookâs minute-person democracy and PICSY mechanisms are based on the categories of politics and economy. However, it is quite possible that the social structuring of politics and economy based on voting and capital was done by chance due to the technology of the time. So, to create from a fusion of those as well.
tonghwi17 Narita: Isnât it possible? In other words, can we conceptualize politics, economics, markets, and voting together? Suzuki: The very possibility of politics and economics, in terms of the relationship between small and large degrees of freedom, is infinite, and the only cut-off point is the economy or politics.
tonghwi17 Narita: In that sense, it is fatal that economics has stopped focusing on things like money and capital. There is very little rethinking of things like currency and money in a broad sense compared to the past. What is the method and language to incorporate them?
tonghwi17 Narita: I am personally interested in how to address issues and problem consciousness that were forgotten around the 18th and 19th century, while using modern techniques of analysis. Suzuki: At that very time, we were trying to tackle the great mystery of the world, the Sense of wonder. But there was no one to think about that. Narita: accurate, but no community fellowship
tonghwi17 Narita: I think about those things quite a bit over coffee or at a bar, but when Iâm in professional research mode, itâs eliminated from my brain. I am in a professional research mode. Suzuki: There was a kind of amateurism in science in the old days. Narita: In fact, everyone was an amateur, even Einstein.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: Nowadays, rather than researchers, people like Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik are writing papers and really implementing them in society, and the world is progressing. [] Suzuki: Nowadays, rather than researchers, people like Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik write papers and really implement them in society. However, what I heard is that researchers of blockchain technology and implementers of blockchain do not intermingle at all.
tonghwi17 SUZUKI: Researchers are by nature powerful people, but they are ravenous beasts kept in zoos, and I want to set them free. Even though I think it would be amazing. Narita: In the past, everyone was like that. I did it with anti-establishment movements that I donât really understand now, like Marxâs time.
tonghwi17 Narita: Keynes was also an economist but a high-profile celebrity, and when he got married, it was a big deal. Even in the mid-20th century, people who were in the origins of operations research, game theory, and computer science were involved in the military as well as in the laboratory.
tonghwi17 Narita: I think the decline of universities in Japan is also an opportunity, in the sense that intellectual production should not end within the university system. It is starting to go outside the system. I think it would be good if those dubious people who have one foot in the corporate world and one foot in the university system start to emerge.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: Going back to âDemocracy in the 22nd Centuryâ, Narita-kun was like an agitator, not involved but agitating. Narita: That is what we are aiming for. In todayâs world, the culture is one where practice is everything. There are fewer people who are just talkative or visionary.
Narita: Rousseau and Marx are worthless, they write forever about their delusions and criticisms of others with only their mouths, similar to people who slander on social networking sites. They donât organize anything themselves, but complain about what others have created, saying âthatâs not true.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: I actually think that is correct, and as a business owner, I have to be realistic somewhere. So there is a limit to self-denial. I was working with Yukito Emaya and NAM, and heâs a great thinker, but if you let him run the organization, heâs a wreck. Narita: We canât even manage the roster.
tonghwi17 Narita: But it is important to let such people speak. Suzuki: Society itself doesnât value such things. Narita: I think he was not appreciated in his own time after all. Recent research has shown that Marx was not appreciated at all until the Russian Revolution happened. He self-published self-help books and so on.
tonghwi17 Suzuki: Rousseau and others, Hiroki Azuma recently published an article explaining how Rousseau was a character assassin, but it was not read at all at the time. It was not read at all at that time. Narita: I was summoned by Azuma-san and lectured for three hours on Rousseauâs theory.
tonghwi17 Narita: So, there are people who have been writing in their rooms for a long time, and then some incident or revolution happens, and then their ideas are evaluated. I think this is a repetition. Suzuki: When you say so, it saves me too.
tonghwi17 Narita: From my point of view, I donât know how Ken-san thinks about these things while running his business company. Suzuki: No, there are many excellent people there. Narita: I think there is more hope than if the CEO is busy with sales, but even if he talks about his vision, I donât think his time frame is in line with the system of a joint-stock company.
tonghwi17 (Iâll leave you here now that my next appointment has arrived)
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