The Future Belongs To The Weird

or the gospel for those out of distribution

If you were born in pre-modern times, the last thing you wanted to be was weird. The most likely outcome of being weird was an untimely and painful death. Unusually weak? They won't want to feed you. Unusually strong? They'll send you to fight an impossible war. Unusually clever? They'll accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake.

Every age found its own way of punishing those with an uncontrolled tendency to look or behave out of distribution. So blending in, concealing your spiky sides, behaving in predictably average ways — that was the rational life strategy for the vast majority of people who have ever lived.

To be fair, most cultures built escape hatches for excess weirdness. Three kinds: temporal, spatial, and role-based. Temporal ones were restricted to certain times — during the Dionysian festivals, the usual rails were suspended. Spatial ones were designated places: bugger off into the wilderness, sail to the New World. (Burning Man is both — a time and a place, maximum containment.) And role-based: the village idiot, the king's jester, certain kinds of monks. If you only needed to escape occasionally, go knock yourself out at a festival. If you couldn't comply permanently, become a hermit. Or a pirate. Or run away with the circus.

Then the frontier shrank. Industrial models of production and education marched across the Earth. In some ways things improved — almost nobody gets literally burned at the stake for being contrarian anymore. But the rails got stronger and the hatches fewer. Skip college and your chances of getting past the automated CV filter are vanishingly small. Ruin your score with Meta and good luck escaping the shadowban, no matter which country you reconnect from. Global institutions, global databases, global algorithms, global castaways. Hard to just "set sail to America and start a new life" these days.

Why normal was good

I don't want to talk about the evil system. Enough people have. I want to talk about why the system worked — and why its days may be numbered.

Humans, like all life, are engaged in a constant and ultimately hopeless battle against chaos. Evolution equipped her warrior children with various weapons. The hydra can regenerate. The virus hijacks other bodies. Our weapons were intellect and institutions.

And the main thing you build institutions from is other humans. For humans to be effective building material, they need to be predictable and interchangeable. What you can predict, you can control. What you can predict, you can build from. The more reliable a component, the easier to slot it into an army, a factory, a company, a church, a country.

Imagine building a clock. Would you want your cogs spiky? Changing over time? Obviously not. The clock has been our dominant metaphor for the world — and for our institutions — for three centuries. In clockwork land, every cog better be exactly what you expect. And if one breaks, you better be able to order a replacement that slots right in.

Hello, industrial education.

Yes, physics abandoned the clockwork universe a century ago. Yes, biology keeps showing us that resilient systems are built from components that learn and adapt and talk to each other, not from uniform parts. Michael Levin's bioelectric work makes this vivid. But quantum weirdness doesn't match our lego-like macro intuitions, and bioelectricity is too subtle, too new. So we're stuck with clock-thinking. For now.

Why weird is about to win

Here's my gospel for the misfits.

One. Being normal was a good strategy because normal = predictable = useful as institutional building material. The risk/reward of being strange didn't pencil out. It only made sense to be strange if you simply couldn't help it, whatever the cost.

Two. With AI — disembodied in software, embodied in robots — the value of predictability is evaporating fast. If you can be predicted, you can be modeled. If you can be modeled, you can be automated. You can't out-cog a robot any more than you can outwork one. If your value rests on achieving a measurable outcome reliably, over and over, you are now competing with the price of electricity. That is not a good thing to compete with.

Three. Institutions have always needed more than predictability. Occasionally you need to leapfrog the pattern, escape the local maximum, sail west on unreasonable faith. Weirdos — the randomness injectors — always had a role. It was just a small role, because the optimal weirdo-to-normie ratio was low. Now that normies can be manufactured at near-zero marginal cost, all humans are better off playing weirdos.

Four. The most valuable thing you can offer the world is no longer a safe pair of hands. It's the sensitivity, strangeness, courage and adaptability of the artist. For the first time in history, the rational strategy for the majority is to embrace weirdness rather than suppress it.

What breaks

Pretty much everything. Three things I keep chewing on:

Education. Our schools were built to bang the weirdness out of children and press them into cog-shapes. But weirdness without adaptability, without tolerance, without enough common ground to make empathy possible — that's as disastrous as the dictatorship of normalcy. Vygotsky's scaffolding becomes more necessary when raising spiky people, not less. It just has to be built around each individual's potential, and removed before it becomes a cage.

Community. Spiky people share less common ground. That could turn the loneliness epidemic into something terminal. Better discovery infrastructure for subcultures helps — the early internet was magic precisely because weirdos finally found their tribes. But in-group huddling isn't enough. We share one planet. More spikiness demands more cross-pollination. We need to grow people who are less alike and simultaneously more interested in each other.

Economy. Weird things fail more often. Our economy is terrible at rewarding failure. Tenure was supposed to solve this for academics — guaranteed employment, freedom to pursue risky long-horizon work. The evidence that it works is weaker than you'd hope. So simply removing pressure (hello, UBI) probably isn't enough. We'll need to actively incentivize the blue-sky and the long-term, or we'll just grow a lot of dead wood.

The strange times

The world of the weird isn't destined to be wonderful. But we have a chance. The transition will be painful and take generations — which is nothing in the grand picture.

For thousands of years, leaning into your weirdness only made sense if you couldn't help it. Our societies functioned because most of their members suppressed their strangeness most of the time.

That era is ending. Get ready for the always-on, ever-present Burning Man. It's coming to sweep us all.

On the off chance you'd like to subscribe to my writing, please feel free to subscribe on twitter or use this RSS feed. Thank you.