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
