What Does Systemic Institutional Collapse Look Like? by Ahmed Gatnash | Devcon SEA

[Music] hi everyone my name is Ahmed I run a human rights organization called kab foundation and I want to tell you the story of adverse incentives playing out and what it looks like when systemic multi-level governance failures happen in your country and your country goes off the rail with nobody at the wheel so what does systemic collapse look like um I'm going to give you a case study of Egypt it's one of the 20 plus countries that we work on there's nothing exceptional about it but it's just uh a good story so um Egypt has had a rapid population growth over the last uh few decades it's added about 24 million people in the last 10 years and there's not enough infrastructure of any kind to support that uh not Transportation not housing not energy not water um it's a water stressed country in the most water stressed region on Earth it has massive external debt and spends about half the national budget each year servicing that debt um because of that it's had to uh seek external loans and devalue its currency multiple times 45% in 2016 40% in 2023 and a third um this last March um that's led to a total collapse in living standards the middle class has been wiped out and with that the tax base and um tens of millions of people have been plunged into poverty there's uh about 20% recorded youth unemployment and the military runs an estimated 40 to 60% of the economy nobody knows exactly how much um so in the face of these um existential looking crises the government responded by doing what any responsible government would do they um took a string of loans from the international monetary fund uh economists have called them a beg State now um they use some of those funds tens of billions of dollars to build a new capital city in the desert um did I mention the water stress they depend on the River Nile for most of their water and one of their U River neighbors Ethiopia has been building a dam this Dam has been planned and constructed over two decades and they sat around and did nothing until it was almost ready and then threatened to bomb the dam how to uh when make friends and influence people 101 um and they've also been building prisons at a horrifying rate uh at least 35 prisons over the last decade including five us style Mega prisons so despite the existential threats facing the country it's really clear that the government sees the primary danger as its own population um you can see that a lot of the ways they've tried to address these problems are basically reinforcing the original problems or the systems that created these problems in the first place so the system is getting further and further away from being able to solve these problems um this is what um it looks like when the internal systems of autocracies fail you have um extreme corruption you have weak governance you have uh ruling generation who are extremely separate even in age from the rest of the population and don't understand them um you have a lack of any kind of vision of what the future looks like and how to get there a lack of accountability systems and no way of error correcting um chronic chronic short-termism every single decision is made based on the easiest short-term thing even if that causes more long-term disasters and seriously misaligned incentives to the extent where it's an serial system the government is fighting against its population to survive um that's what internal uh system failures look like in autocracies they can also happen in Democratic systems and you notice that they're basically the same things they just play out over a much longer time period and a little less viciously because there are you know still some vestiges of error correction um these internal system failures are happening within in an external system failure which is an international relations Paradigm which was built for a very different world it was built for a world in which nation states were self-contained um relatively self-sufficient on addressing uh internal problems on sub lifetime time scales none of that is still relevant and hence the tools being used to resolve these problems and conflicts on an international level are often exacerbating problems and conflicts instead of fixing them so what do we do we can't do what this guy's doing not until Elon gets us to Mars um but even when he does we will probably replicate the same systems that we're used to creating here so we better get good at creating more functional systems um the good news is that the Nobel prize in economics was just awarded a few weeks ago for um some economists who explained how this happens why some systems of governance uh succeed phenomenally and why some completely collapse and the answer wasn't related to culture or availability of Natural Resources or geography it's just institutions institutions have self-reinforcement mechanisms and they either make your country uh better in a virtuous cycle or worse in a vicious cycle um this is an example of an error correction mechanism it's called homeostasis and it's how the human body keeps its systems uh aligned if anything drifts too far in One Direction or the other um it has a system to bring that back into balance no complex organism survives without this what does an error correction mechanism look like in complex Human Social governance we already know the basics freedom of speech so you can find out what the problems are um systems of accountability so you can remove people who are making bad decisions or committing crimes limits on Power and dis versing power through Society so that you're less vulnerable to a single system failing um I want to mention how where trying to have an impact on this area as a human rights organization so first of all um we start off by accepting that these problems are vicious and there is no short-term solution um so we're working on very long time scales we started a Research Center trying to deeply understand institutional Dynamics and feedback loops in our region so how these systems interconnect and how Global Systems affect them the impact of technological change and more um after that we tried to build a system for activating what we're studying so we accelerate activism in the region by equipping them with the tools that they need um for example one of the ways that um failing governments make their societies more fragile is by cutting off all alternate sources of legitimacy from the financial system so that they can't succeed um we are getting activists and organizations inside the Middle East North Africa on chain so that they're uncut off from the financial system and able to get the funds to do their work um as governance systems around the world are becoming increasingly dysfunctional we basically have a choice what to replace them with we either have the Taiwan model where you have society's involvement you have Grassroots movements experimentation collaboration um Tech serving citizens and applying your values in new ways or you have technal authoritarianism you find a competent leader you centralize all the power around them and you probably get rapid technological and economic growth but you also have to pay the price of that the price of that could look like journalists being killed and cut to Pieces inside their country's embassies it could look like women's rights activists being brutalized in prisons it could look like academics being jailed and tortured for mere tweets these are all things that happen in our region um I have one more one warning for you in case that's a difficult choice to make and that's that Global Systems are deeply interconnected and failure modes of these systems tend to metastasize around the world they don't stay contained um and some people believe that we can reach a stable equilibrium between having authoritarian governments in some parts of the world world and liberal democracies elsewhere that doesn't work there is no stable equilibrium between them because these systems tend to export their values and especially export the systems that reinforce their values we've seen this increasingly in recent years as we've seen things like disinformation mobile spyware and transnational repression techniques that were developed in the Laboratories of authoritarian regimes um basically become internationalized and released on the world um the good news is that we choose which systems to empower we've heard from so many people building systems that can make a difference over the last few days um I'd advise two Builders to include activists um in your spaces to connect with us to collaborate to support us and to study our problems because they may someday be yours thank you thank you so much Ahmed for your presentation um so we'll have a Q&A as usual so it's the last day so you probably already know how this goes um but yeah I encourage you once again to participate uh even by either by asking questions or of course uh by up voting so the first question um that we have received is equality under the law is a liberal value but Equity is equality of outcome which is not a liberal value but a socialist value isn't it um that's a a political conversation I don't want to impose my own values like these things are being discussed within all societies um but it's about developing systems that manifest the values that you want to see and making sure those systems are strong and protected thank you and then the the other question we've received so far is what if autocratic governments can be more effective than de democracies this is a real problem that people are studying in democratization my own sense is that they can be more effective but you have no way of making sure that they are and if you choose that path and then it turns out not to be more effective you can't go back and change the election so you might be trying to select um a Singapore model and you end up with more of an Iran model um whereas with um Democratic systems you can at least change your mind and try something different if what you tried first didn't work thanks and we have one more question um so of course we have some more time for questions so please feel free to send in more so this question is why do liberal democracies choose author authoritarian leaders yeah there's a there's been a lot of discussion about this over the last few years um I think it's multicausal um one of the um reasons is that people feel so deeply delusioned by the existing system that they just want someone to come and destroy it um and it's a fact that a lot of people feel unrepresented by systems of governance in a lot of liberal democracies they feel like they're set up to cater for um special interests especially uh specific economic interests and the system which claims to represent everyone equally doesn't actually represent everyone um I think that's one of the key reasons thanks and uh the next question that just came in are we facing an Epoch of all authoritarian leaders colluding we absolutely are uh we see that in our region um authoritarian governments get together they share intelligence they Share technology they share techniques we even had a hashtag um in the Arab Spring early in the Arab Spring we uh used to tweet on the hashtag Arab Tyrant manual because it was so comical the extent to which certain responses to popular protest would spread from country to Country and just keep appearing in different places that it was almost like were reading from a single manual um so I think that Civil Society has to collaborate at least as effectively as authoritarians if we want to succeed uh next question is how do we provide hope to combat this illusionment can crypto play a role in this um I hope so but it depends on us again it depends on what systems we use it to build and whether they're um centralizing systems whether they're just casinos for gambling or whether they are systems of representation and accountability and um enabling more effective institutions to exist yeah thank you and then we also have the question if autocratic governments can be more effective are we are going to end up in a China like Global State I don't think so I think um autocratic governments fight between each other far too much it's all about ego and centralization um but that's also why we're all doing what we're doing it's because we want to ensure that we live in accountable um societies thanks and uh what conrete steps do you think the average person can take to push Society in the right direction on this issue that really depends on your position and your skills and your background um I'd say you have to study what you can do really deeply and think hard about it and um choose a path and make sure that your life has a purpose and you're working for that purpose not to just go through looking after yourself financially and and contributing nothing to the world and uh coming to probably the second to last question a global collaberation of fascist does not really make sense no will this be a global meritocracy will classism beat racism uh I have no idea again it depends on if we build systems that uh reinforce our values or if we allow systems to be built that reinforce autocracy um and again the choice is entirely up to us and whether we do our work well um and it's the Next Generation mostly that's going to reap the consequences of the systems that we build in our lifetimes cool and then we come to the final question which is how can we enable decentralization without resisting liberal values completely I mean that's that's deeply philosophical and uh I'd love to have a chat about it afterwards whoever ask that okay perfect that uh uh with that we come to a close thank you so much for the presentation and the