What's funny is its not even representative of western culture. I'm in Nashville, and like with many intellectual pursuits the middle of the US is often overlooked. It's more of an ideological likeness though, I suspect. Movements shrink up and tend not to venture too far away ideologically. That's how these NGOs work. They need coherence. Not sure how to fix that, but this is why I don't apply to a lot of things unless I know the leaders personally. You have a snowballs chance in hell if you don't align perfectly with their goals.
I second this! Based in Salt Lake City it’s wild to see so much coverage of what is going on in San Francisco and New York when that’s not the experience of the rest of the country. It was particularly stark during the pandemic, when all of the journalists based in New York were reporting on an experience no one in our state was facing. We could use diversity of coverage!
I’m trying to rectify this though by focusing on community building other progress thinkers where I live, rather than always trying to get out to SF.
Hello Etienne, I have been following your writing since the french blog. I live in Quebec, in a 95% french environment but your ideas still reach me, so that's the counterpoint I'd like to expend upon.
In order for ideas of the anglophere to diffuse beyond, there seems to be two big vectors: authors who evangelize in the non-english language, or simply more people who read English.
In every language, there are people with big audiences for that language. However, the size of the potential audience seems to limit how niche your subjects can be before they find almost no-one. The logical conclusion is that the local language evangelizing is best done by people who already have a big general audience. But these will want more surface level and widely appealing messages.
English is now the linga franca of international discussions. People who gravitate towards niche subjects like, say, beating Mario 64 with very few A button presses, will find it rewarding early on to participate in the anglosphere. That of course leaves behind lots of people for which the barrier to entry is high. The conclusion to me seems that the best way for ideas to diffuse globally is through more people learning English easily, to lower that barrier.
A downside is that this kind of mono-culture will be more homogenous than if the ideas are planted in isolated cultures and allowed to develop more independently with the barrier of language. But that seems a bit unavoidable if the goal is for ideas to reach all the participant pool.
Hi Jonathan, thanks for the gentle pushback! You're mostly right, but let me expand on the ideas in the post: I don't think it's really just about language, but also about what it means to become the sort of person or organization who has the ability to influence things. If someone wants to change Quebec politics, for example, you simply can't write only in English. You can have *some* influence that way (e.g. François Legault reading the book Abundance), but you're limiting yourself. However it certainly makes sense to contribute to the English-language admiral ship of the movement, like I do (and will keep doing).
I'm reading this from New Zealand. My impression of ANZ is that while singular events like Abundance the book may not make as much of a splash, activists still definitely take their cues from the US and occasionally Europe, it's just that the ideas take a while to percolate down. I think you could make a case for focusing solely on US/UK politics to cover the anglo countries.
I also think about the Transit Costs Project here. They've done a great job of cultivating a global team - drawing on local expertise from Africa to East Asia to Europe, and leveraging that to do global analysis. It's revealed some real anglosphere blind spots. If you only looked at anglo sources you might think that transit has similar issues everywhere, and it's just a matter of degree. But it really does seem like there are some harmful project management memes that have saturated the anglosphere without being present in, say, Korea.
The other thing with TCP is that they're based in New York. It's probably difficult to get a multinational team to relocate to Toulouse, relative to London, NYC, or SF.
Great points. Yeah for other Anglo countries it’s probably sufficient to have movements to influence local policy but with less need for idea generation, maybe. And maybe that’s true of all countries, but I worry about monoculturalism. It’s really important to try many things no matter the field, but that’s in tension with trying to have a global impact or just maximizing your own personal impact.
Yeah, I worry about the monoculture too, but I think that's a much bigger issue we don't have an answer for yet.
Even though it's useful to have these 'quarantined' cultures, I think it's outweighed by the cost of the lost scale and agglomeration. For now I feel the best strategy is just to keep pushing scale and growth as hard as we can, which gives us the best chance of setting up a real archipelago when someone figures that out. But I'm also sympathetic to the Robin Hanson view that is much more worried about this.
Tous les gouvernement ont quelque chose à dire sur l'innovation, mais ça ne veut pas dire qu'ils s'en occupent bien... Le gouvernement québécois a peut-être un peu trop tendance à essayer d'influencer l'innovation (ex : Northvolt) plutôt que de simplement lui donner le champ libre et quelques bons incitatifs.
Maybe one solution would be to use machine translation (which is quite good nowadays) to make all your articles available in the main European languages.
That way, you’d keep the Anglo privilege of strong network effects, but still make your work more accessible to readers in other countries. I doubt the impact would be huge (most people who care about this topic probably already understand English), but the effort required is rather minimal.
The main challenge, I think, is the interface. Ideally, it should be easy to switch the language of the article -- and even of the comments. Does Substack support that? I don’t remember seeing a blog that offered this feature.
I do think translation is basically a solved problem, but it's not really the bottleneck here. There are also broader cultural concerns. I think we need intellectuals / influencers to be active in their own countries for the ideas to actually spread there, and responding to people, organizing events, etc.; just translating texts is only a small part of it.
One thing I've seen some early success with is encouraging others to run with the same idea, but from a different starting point. That kicks the alignment can down the road which is fine IMO – universal elements of progress will fall out of the mix later on. Also gives other centers much more ownership over the project and they can contextualize it to their locale. Critical aspect is not selling the vision you already have, but sparking an adjacent one
You're undoubtedly correct to push for polycentrism. Considering the externalities of past progress became universal concerns (pandemics, climate, waste, pollution), it's wise to assume that they will do the same for future vectors of progress.
Yes, I'm not too worried about alignment, I think it will arise naturally if various movements have the same core values (and if they don't then that's fine too, they're just totally different movements). Progress is indeed a rather universal thing to aspire for with lots of spillover effects. In some sense there's perhaps even a fairness dimension: it's in the interest of the most innovative places to ensure other places are also innovative, since otherwise those other places will benefit from the spillover without contributing much.
I empathize with the "screaming into your native void" problem completely! The difference in community and engagement was night and day when i switched to English (and i'm a very small writer!).
It's such a shame that language-specific circles are so hard to find on the internet (i blame the algorithms of course). It's half a joke, but also half true: when all the platforms are built in the usa, and the algorithms are trained first and foremost on english content, the other languages suffer. And then it's a numbers game: from what i remember, there's about 300 million people speaking French in the whole world, and that's less than the population of the USA alone!
All this to say: i'm glad you're trying to change things, and to propagate those ideas of progress to a wider audience. And i'll happily sign up to whatever French newsletter you end up writing :))
Merci! On ne peut pas changer la démographie (en tout cas, pas rapidement...) mais on peut faire en sorte que les bonnes idées se propagent mieux entre les grands blocs linguistiques :)
What's funny is its not even representative of western culture. I'm in Nashville, and like with many intellectual pursuits the middle of the US is often overlooked. It's more of an ideological likeness though, I suspect. Movements shrink up and tend not to venture too far away ideologically. That's how these NGOs work. They need coherence. Not sure how to fix that, but this is why I don't apply to a lot of things unless I know the leaders personally. You have a snowballs chance in hell if you don't align perfectly with their goals.
I second this! Based in Salt Lake City it’s wild to see so much coverage of what is going on in San Francisco and New York when that’s not the experience of the rest of the country. It was particularly stark during the pandemic, when all of the journalists based in New York were reporting on an experience no one in our state was facing. We could use diversity of coverage!
I’m trying to rectify this though by focusing on community building other progress thinkers where I live, rather than always trying to get out to SF.
Yes, the cultural differences between the cities and regions of a single country definitely matter too!
Hello Etienne, I have been following your writing since the french blog. I live in Quebec, in a 95% french environment but your ideas still reach me, so that's the counterpoint I'd like to expend upon.
In order for ideas of the anglophere to diffuse beyond, there seems to be two big vectors: authors who evangelize in the non-english language, or simply more people who read English.
In every language, there are people with big audiences for that language. However, the size of the potential audience seems to limit how niche your subjects can be before they find almost no-one. The logical conclusion is that the local language evangelizing is best done by people who already have a big general audience. But these will want more surface level and widely appealing messages.
English is now the linga franca of international discussions. People who gravitate towards niche subjects like, say, beating Mario 64 with very few A button presses, will find it rewarding early on to participate in the anglosphere. That of course leaves behind lots of people for which the barrier to entry is high. The conclusion to me seems that the best way for ideas to diffuse globally is through more people learning English easily, to lower that barrier.
A downside is that this kind of mono-culture will be more homogenous than if the ideas are planted in isolated cultures and allowed to develop more independently with the barrier of language. But that seems a bit unavoidable if the goal is for ideas to reach all the participant pool.
Hi Jonathan, thanks for the gentle pushback! You're mostly right, but let me expand on the ideas in the post: I don't think it's really just about language, but also about what it means to become the sort of person or organization who has the ability to influence things. If someone wants to change Quebec politics, for example, you simply can't write only in English. You can have *some* influence that way (e.g. François Legault reading the book Abundance), but you're limiting yourself. However it certainly makes sense to contribute to the English-language admiral ship of the movement, like I do (and will keep doing).
Great piece! Trying to do this in Portugual right now.
Good luck! I’m very interested in how it works out
I'm reading this from New Zealand. My impression of ANZ is that while singular events like Abundance the book may not make as much of a splash, activists still definitely take their cues from the US and occasionally Europe, it's just that the ideas take a while to percolate down. I think you could make a case for focusing solely on US/UK politics to cover the anglo countries.
I also think about the Transit Costs Project here. They've done a great job of cultivating a global team - drawing on local expertise from Africa to East Asia to Europe, and leveraging that to do global analysis. It's revealed some real anglosphere blind spots. If you only looked at anglo sources you might think that transit has similar issues everywhere, and it's just a matter of degree. But it really does seem like there are some harmful project management memes that have saturated the anglosphere without being present in, say, Korea.
The other thing with TCP is that they're based in New York. It's probably difficult to get a multinational team to relocate to Toulouse, relative to London, NYC, or SF.
Great points. Yeah for other Anglo countries it’s probably sufficient to have movements to influence local policy but with less need for idea generation, maybe. And maybe that’s true of all countries, but I worry about monoculturalism. It’s really important to try many things no matter the field, but that’s in tension with trying to have a global impact or just maximizing your own personal impact.
Yeah, I worry about the monoculture too, but I think that's a much bigger issue we don't have an answer for yet.
Even though it's useful to have these 'quarantined' cultures, I think it's outweighed by the cost of the lost scale and agglomeration. For now I feel the best strategy is just to keep pushing scale and growth as hard as we can, which gives us the best chance of setting up a real archipelago when someone figures that out. But I'm also sympathetic to the Robin Hanson view that is much more worried about this.
Théoriquement, on a une ministre de l’innovation au Québec… Bon, Christine Fréchette doit aussi s’occuper de l’économie et de l’énergie en même temps.
Tous les gouvernement ont quelque chose à dire sur l'innovation, mais ça ne veut pas dire qu'ils s'en occupent bien... Le gouvernement québécois a peut-être un peu trop tendance à essayer d'influencer l'innovation (ex : Northvolt) plutôt que de simplement lui donner le champ libre et quelques bons incitatifs.
Maybe one solution would be to use machine translation (which is quite good nowadays) to make all your articles available in the main European languages.
That way, you’d keep the Anglo privilege of strong network effects, but still make your work more accessible to readers in other countries. I doubt the impact would be huge (most people who care about this topic probably already understand English), but the effort required is rather minimal.
The main challenge, I think, is the interface. Ideally, it should be easy to switch the language of the article -- and even of the comments. Does Substack support that? I don’t remember seeing a blog that offered this feature.
I do think translation is basically a solved problem, but it's not really the bottleneck here. There are also broader cultural concerns. I think we need intellectuals / influencers to be active in their own countries for the ideas to actually spread there, and responding to people, organizing events, etc.; just translating texts is only a small part of it.
One thing I've seen some early success with is encouraging others to run with the same idea, but from a different starting point. That kicks the alignment can down the road which is fine IMO – universal elements of progress will fall out of the mix later on. Also gives other centers much more ownership over the project and they can contextualize it to their locale. Critical aspect is not selling the vision you already have, but sparking an adjacent one
You're undoubtedly correct to push for polycentrism. Considering the externalities of past progress became universal concerns (pandemics, climate, waste, pollution), it's wise to assume that they will do the same for future vectors of progress.
Yes, I'm not too worried about alignment, I think it will arise naturally if various movements have the same core values (and if they don't then that's fine too, they're just totally different movements). Progress is indeed a rather universal thing to aspire for with lots of spillover effects. In some sense there's perhaps even a fairness dimension: it's in the interest of the most innovative places to ensure other places are also innovative, since otherwise those other places will benefit from the spillover without contributing much.
Pokémon was always more fun when your whole squad leveled up with equanimity :)
Hahaha awesome analogy
I empathize with the "screaming into your native void" problem completely! The difference in community and engagement was night and day when i switched to English (and i'm a very small writer!).
It's such a shame that language-specific circles are so hard to find on the internet (i blame the algorithms of course). It's half a joke, but also half true: when all the platforms are built in the usa, and the algorithms are trained first and foremost on english content, the other languages suffer. And then it's a numbers game: from what i remember, there's about 300 million people speaking French in the whole world, and that's less than the population of the USA alone!
All this to say: i'm glad you're trying to change things, and to propagate those ideas of progress to a wider audience. And i'll happily sign up to whatever French newsletter you end up writing :))
Merci! On ne peut pas changer la démographie (en tout cas, pas rapidement...) mais on peut faire en sorte que les bonnes idées se propagent mieux entre les grands blocs linguistiques :)