The late David Graeber provoked strong reactions. In addition to his professional career as an anthropologist, he also helped launch Occupy Wall Street and has been active in radical anarchist politics. His new and final book fits that bill. But not in the way you think.
In his last book before his untimely death, Graeber upends assumptions you didn’t even know you have. The Dawn of Everything rewilds the implicit Grand Narratives that many in modern humans, particularly in the “West,” tell ourselves about the origin of civilization and its development to the present day.
That story goes something like the following. Around twelve thousand years ago, humans developed agriculture. Irrigation took a lot of manpower. Permanent settlements necessitated hierarchies. New priest kings emerged to manage the larger scale societies and issues that inevitable emerged. Here's a more elaborated version courtesy of ChatGPT:
Primitive Egalitarianism: Early human societies were small, simple, and egalitarian. These were hunter-gatherer groups where resources were shared, and social hierarchies were minimal or non-existent.
Agricultural Revolution: With the advent of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, humans began to settle in one place, leading to the development of surplus food production. This surplus allowed for population growth and the emergence of complex societies.
Rise of Civilization: The surplus from agriculture led to the development of cities, states, and complex social structures. Hierarchies emerged, including class divisions and the establishment of ruling elites. This period is often associated with the development of writing, organized religion, and other hallmarks of "civilization."
Inevitability of Inequality: As societies grew larger and more complex, inequality became an inevitable consequence. The standard narrative suggests that social hierarchies, centralized governments, and institutionalized inequality are natural outcomes of human development.
Except that’s not what actually happened. Many cities existed for thousands of years without rigid hierarchies or the god kings one might expect. Many human societies chose to only partially utilize agriculture. There are also examples like the Maya where it seems those of lower status rejected their lot in life en masse and simply returned to live in the jungle again.
So why do we have that pat story about the origin of civilization? That story did not emerge spontaneously out of the void.
The Dawn of Everything argues that much of our mythology of the modern world stems from the European Enlightenment. That’s no surprise. We live in the world that Europeans from that era conquered. And we are confronted with the question of why some humans have a vastly different way of life than others, with very different social and physical technologies.
That story takes on various specific forms but broadly operates as a justification for why Europeans went forth to dominate the planet over the past several centuries. Some of those stories are more dark than others. One version of the story that’s still acceptable in polite company today is to say for a variety of factors Europe developed the bedrock ideologies of the modern world: science, liberalism and the free inquiry that made the modern world possible.
That story neglects a massive and when you really think about it, an obvious factor. Let’s not forget that this was a Europe that was burning scientists like Galileo at the stake not too long ago. Medieval Europe emphatically did not see men as created equal. Neither did Greece or Rome for that matter. Where did that radical idea come from then?
The Age of European Conquest (or Discovery if you prefer) ran alongside the Enlightenment. Europeans were thrust face to face with peoples with radically different ways of life. The Noble savage for instance came from the idea that indigenous Americans lived a life of luxury that most resembled that of European nobility. Today the phrase noble savage conjures up images of racist European but even that is to miss the point of the Indigenous critique.
The entire pre-European way of life was a profound shot across the bow to Europe. If many in the Americas were free to spend their days in activities like hunting and voluntary political discussion amongst equals, something that only the highest in status back in Europe were able to do, what did that say about the advancement of European society?
Think for a moment about the state of nature conceit that forms the bedrock of Enlightenment political philosophy -- in particular Rousseau’s Origin of Inequality or Locke’s Second Treatis on Government or Hobbes’ Leviathon. These perspectives are all of course European and really the null hypothesis if you know a smidge of history should be that those “thought experiments” were downstream of the culture shock of Europeans meeting Americans. All that neglects something obvious though.
Those first peoples of the Americas had their own agency. The first few chapters of The Dawn of Everything offer a great distillation of an early statesman and philosopher that had a profound influence on the Enlightenment. If you’re iffy on reading the rather long book, which given its scope unsurprisingly rambles, those chapters that focus on the Indigeneous critique of European society before the Enlightenment are really powerful.
I’ll also just say that I really haven’t done justice to the wonderful examples and digressions in that section of that book. I might even go so far as to say that that perspective offers a portal to a world beyond the all consuming culture war in modern America. That’s a speculation for another day though.
Instead I’ll just end with a few potential secants that share why this book resonated so strongly with me and in particular vibed :P with the web3 explorations that I’ve been partaking in. The Dawn of Everything articulates three fundamental freedoms from which the more familiar freedoms like speech, association, contracting and others ultimately flow. Those three are:
The freedom to disobey
The freedom of exit
The freedom to create new social arrangements
The Dawn of Everything also makes a powerful case that the third freedom flows from the first two. It’s only when people are free to disobey and exit that they have leverage to actually create the social arrangements they desire. It’s no accident that the US Constitution for example was created after a revolutionary war which is an example of exit and disobeying par excellence.
Those freedoms of exit and disobeying were once more prevalent and fluid. In a more hunter gather or hybrid early agricultural society, a human might choose to leave one tribe and join another. That of course had risks but the option was there. Societies also had many more seasonal fluctuations, with very rigid hierarchical structures one day when the tribe is resource constrained and radically more egalitarian structures in a different season.
These days, however, in our world with national borders and many more rules about what a human can and cannot do, the freedom to disobey and exit find their most powerful homes online. There is something wonderfully liberating about the janky UX and early internet feel of the web3 world. You can leave the world of atoms and find your tribe online as that early web 1.0 adage had it.
The term web3 has taken on a crypto context. Not too long ago, however, I remember the third wave of the internet referring to the distribution of the web to well everywhere. Institutions everywhere would be transformed. This view was often articulated by early AOL pioneer Steve Case and it deserves to be reconsidered as web3 is now suboptimally often narrowly used to mean crypto-ish stuff.
There’s so much more afoot and not just in terms of the other big tech megatrends like VR, AR, ML, IoT yada blada. The web has infused so much of daily life and realizing so much of its potential has nothing to do with tools or hard technology. It has everything to do with the choices we make about other soft technologies, namely the institutions that Steve Case is talking about.
The pandemic has accelerated internet adoption across everything and everywhere as lockdown forced everyone to live online. See below for an illustrative slide from Benedict Evans’ 2021 annual presentation.
Many if not most if really let’s be honest pretty much all techies are focused on ecommerce and other money making opportunities. So much of the most profound change has actually been happening away from the acceleration of the existing ecommerce transformation. Consider the humble public comment hearing.
That’s a foundational aspect of democracy in the United States. It was also powerfully transformed by the shift from in person meetings to zoom. Lockdown and urgency of racial justice in the summer of 2020 meant that many normally empty city meetings were packed and highly charged.
There’s also been a host of efforts to develop new protocols and norms to utilize those digital tools to better listen and hear voices. Many of the practices are old hat for the Very Online crowd but are radically outside the comfort zone for public institutions. In my #DayJob, there have been many encouraging developments in ways to hear the voices of Jane Q Public for the billion dollar economic development program California has embarked on.
The web 3.0 story is still being written. I like Steve’s case term of the Internet of Everything. And if I can play pop thinker word coiner for a moment, I’ll mash up that term with Graeber’s book to say that we’re at the cusp of The Dawn of the Internet of Everything. The web has transformed more than we realize, even those of Very Online folks who pay such close attention to its impact. Consider for example a couple of the most basic means of human communication:
Pictograms have been reinvented by emojis as shown by the probably familiar meme of emojis side by side with hieroglyphics.
Pictures everywhere from anytime have scrambled our sense of what is real, even for those of us educated on the existence of deepfakes and trained to look for disinfo.
Memory has shifted inextricably as so much of what jogs our wetware data banks now lies in our external devices and queries / calculations happen outside the brain.
Those are very foundational shifts. So much more that upends centuries old assumptions embedded in basic institutions has shifted. Covid was exactly the sort of shock to the system that was necessary to jolt the institutional inertia and bring the old guard kicking and screaming into the new digitally native institutional reality.
Of course it’s still just the beginning. Many industries are still pitifully far along the digital transformation curve. A decade ago, I helped launch the a data collaborative focused on California water. Tremendous progress has been made. A colleague recently quoted a Gartner-esque industry reports of sector-by-sector digital transformation showing that water lagged every industry except hunting. Kinda funny when you think about it but then also kinda fitting from a primal perspective.
Institutions operate on the time scale of generations, not instantaneous twitter twaddle. This will be a generational shift over the course of decades. Many of the biggest fights lie in the future. But they will come. The Covid Great Reboot has set the course. And now in a million different ways, many have a choice about what sort of world we want to create.
In that way, the Dawn of Everything actually lives up to its title. The book is not the answer to everything under the sun. It’s not a prospective guide for better social or political arrangements. Instead the book shares underappreciated aspects about the human origin story. Like the daily sunrise that we can easily ignore because it feels quotidian, such origin stories forms the air we all breath, the implicit assumptions about what a daily rhythm looks like, what is “normal.”
This book isn’t an answer. Rather it’s a wonderful question. The work invites us to reconsider deeply held beliefs we didn’t know we had. Graeber and Wengrow show over and over again how many aspects of human societies weren’t structurally determined but instead reflected conscious choices of the participants.
The book shows how today, like every day before and every day thereafter, we as humans have that same choice, if we have courage to look upon the world with wonder once again and see the dawn with new eyes.
Appendix -- Choice quotes from the Book
@patwater
35 comments
This is the time of year when some offices in San Francisco get a bit quiet as people head to the dust. I’ve never been to Burning Man (haven’t felt compelled just yet). But I’ve spoken at length with the organization’s official historian, Stuart Mangrum. Stuart is the director of Burning Man’s philosophical center and was a long-time “co-conspirator” to the founder, Larry Harvey. Every year, an announcement is published of a unique theme to guide the artworks and community. Stuart is the one who writes these themes. Why did I speak with him when I’ve never been involved with Burning Man? Unexpected reason. The University of Oxford was building case studies of organizations for its business school. I wrote the one for Burning Man. The first thing I learned is how people who go to Burning Man distinguish between the overall community versus the Burning Man Project, the organization which handles ticket sales and now a multi-million dollar budget for creating a temporary city in the desert. There’s a love-hate relationship with that organization. Burning Man is an experiment in decentralization, but supporting the massive growth of the festival has required a certain degree of centralization. In the early days, there was no such thing as a ticket to Burning Man. The concept emerged in 1994 at $30 per ticket. Today, tickets start at over 16x that starting price. It is not unusual for people to spend thousands of dollars to attend the festival. Much of this was promoted by a need for safety. The first death of someone at the festival prompted a need for better safety, which costs money. I was very interested in how the “leadership” of the Burning Man Project viewed themselves through these changes. They remain vocally dedicated to decentralization and struck me as reluctant leaders, even if the organization’s corporateness now may not seem that way outwardly. After all, Burning Man started as a bonfire among friends on Baker Beach (even earlier roots go back to activities by anarchic societies in San Francisco). Nobody set out in the beginning with an ambition to manage an increasingly overpopulated city. But they do now. I see many parallels between Burning Man’s evolution and what I’m observing in the Farcaster community. One is a physical space, another is a virtual space. Both are trying to resist centralization as much as possible by principle, which is not easy to do through growth. If people here are interested in more of my musings on this topic, I’m happy to share bits of my conversation with Stuart. I’ve also been meaning to speak with him again for another project. So feel free to ask questions for him too. The photo is not mine. Couldn’t find the original source. But it’s a famous photo from 2022 when more than 70,000 people were departing Burning Man. It triggered a 9 hour, 14 lane traffic jam in the desert.
would love to hear more!! i did a tiny bit of work for the org a few years ago and it was a really fascinating look into how things happen
thanks for the insight, super interesting to read 20000 $betr
Thanks for reading 🫶
I went for the first time in 2006. I read a book on the history of the event in preparation. I'm glad I did - it helped me understand and prepare to embrace the anarchic communal aspects of the experience. I came with very little but a didgeridoo and a willingness to be helpful. These two things unlocked many doors for me and led to life changing experiences. I highly suggest you go, if not this year then next. Although I can't say what it's like now, my last trip was in 2010.
“I came with very little but a didgeridoo and a willingness to be helpful.” This would make a great opening line to a chapter in your autobiography someday.
"Burning Man started as a bonfire among friends on Baker Beach" Say more on this!
https://presidio.gov/explore/blog/then-now-burning-man-at-baker-beach
can we read your case study? id be interested to know where the "borders" were, either temporally or numerically or demographically, that changed the structure and feel of BM. always wanted to go when i was a kid but dont think i wanna go as it is today
I thought about sharing it here. Unlike my silly, quickly written casts where I mind less if content theft occurs, this took a while to research/write and has some gems I’ll keep in the vault for now. If we ever meet in person, I’ll show you. :) When you say borders do you mean inflection points where the organization was forced to respond? What I learned is that every year things change. But some years force a bigger response than others. One fact you might find interesting is they brought on an urban planner named Rod Garrett. He had a lot of experience dealing with city planning and became their chief designer. He’s the one who came up with the iconic concentric circles of the camps.
amazing... you could always put it on the blockchain for provenance hehe. but i understand. look fwd to reading it one day :)
Reminds me of the Garden City Movement by Ebenezer Howard from the late 1890s/1900s. Howard’s Garden Cities proposed circular, self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelts. Radial boulevards extended from a form of central park and/or civic core. The goal was to balance nature, housing, and industry in a rational, almost utopian form.
I think the successor concept to Burning Man is the Network State. @davidhoffman talks about this a bit here: https://www.bankless.com/davids-takes-burning-man Popup cities/villages like @edgecity embody a lot of this energy too. I think one of the main problems with Burning Man (from the outside looking in) is that it was invented pre-smartphone. If you were starting it from scratch today, the #1 rule to impose would be something like: no phones, no instagram, analog photography only, chatham house rules.
I read the Network State literature when it first came out and was very intrigued. Never thought to draw a connection to Burning Man. Thank you for sending!
Casually writing an Oxford case study?! Omg @patriciaxlee.eth you’re awesome
I’ve never been myself, I have many friends that have gone, and my oldest brother was involved in the very early days and went many times. I’ve heard lots of cool and crazy stories!! I kinda wish I had gone in those early days… 5042 $betr
Insane shot! Damn
Wish I could find the original photographer. It’s been re-posted so many times without credit I couldn’t find them.
What do you think “real” cities can learn from burning man? Have you read Graeber’s the dawn of humanity and the seasonality to certain cities?
I have not read that. What did you find interesting from it? I’m not sure what real cities can learn from Burning Man honestly. Cities are at a completely different level of organization and continuity. The lessons from Black Rock City feel a lot more applicable to emergency response situations, which burners have a history of participating in (like Hurricane Katrina).
Here’s a little riff on that book and the implications for this third wave of the web https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/rewilding-civilization-david-graebers-radical-vision-in-the-dawn-of-everything It can be easy to forget that the vast vast vast majority of the human story as in something like 98% of generations lived occurred in non-sedentary environments. There are powerful examples like the step people civilizations of seminomadic lifestyles. Some of what new intentional communities in the Webb are unlocking Harkins back to that. I’ve never been to the Playa though from afar it seems to echo that . I do enjoy camping with family and old friends who are like family and a little pop-up village of sorts once a year.
I want your opinion.
Look I built an XCH rig over the pandemic with my gaming group so obviously farming is good Then again I've read Graeber and know anthropology so know that the human diet and plummeted after the agricultural revolution So pros and cons https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/rewilding-civilization-david-graebers-radical-vision-in-the-dawn-of-everything
Ha ha ... Amazing I'll give it a read.
It's first a positive word till it's not
When does it become negative??
It's not negative, it's not just positive anymore.... The point where people start to use the wrong farming ethics
Back with a fresh edition of our weekly digest where we hand-pick some of our favorite posts over the past month-ish.
First up, @jackson dives into the topic of "taste" in a world of overwhelming abundance of choices in consumption and creation. Jackson emphasizes that true taste arises from prolonged attention, skill, and personal expression, suggesting that slowing down and immersing yourself deeply into your interests leads to richer experiences and better quality in both consumption and creation. https://paragraph.xyz/@jd/taste-time-attention
Next, the @variant team — @jesse @li @alanadlevin @derekmw23 @gham1lt0n — take stock of what the rest of 2024 will hold and what we might see heading into 2025, highlighting the trends and ideas that will shape the next wave of crypto development. https://blog.variant.fund/things-excited-about-crypto
@patwater reviews The Dawn of Everything, using it as a canvas to explore the potential to pioneer new modes of living, working, and playing with the third wave of the web. "Graeber and Wengrow show over and over again how many aspects of human societies weren’t structurally determined but instead reflected conscious choices of the participants. The book shows how today, like every day before and every day thereafter, we as humans have that same choice, if we have courage to look upon the world with wonder once again and see the dawn with new eyes." https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/rewilding-civilization-david-graebers-radical-vision-in-the-dawn-of-everything
Amazing to read all this! Love the concept of what you’re doing here.
Love to hear it, thank you! 🙏
The late David Graeber provoked strong reactions. In addition to his professional career as an anthropologist, he also helped launch Occupy Wall Street and has been active in radical anarchist politics. His new and final book fits that bill. But not in the way you think. In his last book before his untimely death, Graeber upends assumptions you didn’t even know you have. https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/rewilding-civilization-david-graebers-radical-vision-in-the-dawn-of-everything
One of my news years resolutions was to log more ideas on the web more regularly, an activity some folks shorten into the portmanteau "blog." I'm up to 33 pieces for the year! My latest piece reviews David Graeber's "dawn of everything" and uses that refactored perspective on civilization to explore the potential to pioneer new modes of living, working and playing with the third wave of the web https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/rewilding-civilization-david-graebers-radical-vision-in-the-dawn-of-everything