Why Substack will be the intellectual engine of the 21st century

The platform is a digital Royal Society for today's greatest minds — and it could play an essential role in shaping the next civilization.

Shedrick Pelt for The Washington Post via Getty Images

By Peter Leyden

The last time humans created a new civilization was during The Enlightenment, the period of time from about 1680 to 1800 that gave birth to many of the core technologies, economic systems, and government institutions that led to the modern world.

My last essay laid out how the people of that time created six mega-inventions that changed the world in fundamental ways: mechanical engines, carbon energies, the Industrial Revolution, financial capitalism, representative democracy, and nation states.

Each of those mega-inventions has a direct parallel that has emerged or is emerging in our world today, as you can see in the graphic below. They are artificial intelligence, clean energies, the biological revolution, and what might soon come to be known as sustainable capitalism, digital democracy, and global governance.

The mega-inventions of The Enlightenment started out as ideas shared during robust conversations among some of the smartest, most knowledgeable, most innovative people of that time: “the men of letters.” (Given the social norms of that time, they were all men, and for that matter, none of them were people of color.)

I want to focus on the “letters” part of that phrase and point out that the prerequisite for bringing about such civilizational-scale change during The Enlightenment was a series of technological innovations that dramatically improved communications among the intellectual elites.

The printing press had been around since roughly 1450, but it wasn’t until The Enlightenment that we saw the widespread printing of secular books, the spread of newspapers, and the build-out of public postal systems. Thanks to these innovations, the men of letters could send their letters to each other, read each other’s books, and keep up to date on the news happening in different countries.

This was an incredible upgrade in communications technology compared to past centuries, but the people of that time still needed to physically gather for much of their collaborative work, such as showing experiments, demoing new inventions, and engaging in nuanced debates with multiple people.

Enter the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the full formal name for what we now just call the Royal Society.

John Arthur Quartley created this wood engraving depicting a meeting of the Royal Society.

Formed in 1660, the Royal Society is the world’s oldest national scientific institution, and it was one of the key hubs for the intellectual ferment of The Enlightenment.

Isaac Newton, who invented calculus, came up with the theory of gravity, and served as Master of the Royal Mint, was a member. So were John Locke, the philosopher who laid the foundations of modern liberalism and natural rights, and America’s own Ben Franklin, the polymath scientist, inventor, diplomat, and a founder of the United States.

The Royal Society had a physical location in London where members regularly gathered to learn from each other and have conversations about the most important issues of their time. They also hosted foreign peers who were not members — Voltaire, the writer and satirist, spent time there while in exile from France.

Imagine what these men of letters would have done with the tools that are coming together on Substack today. They would all be able to see Newton’s latest essay instantly, or see whose newsletters he reads, or what essays he particularly likes, or get his daily thoughts in short posts.

They’d also be able to see the comments that Locke made on Isaac’s new essay, and then see Isaac’s response, and then see them shift to the Chat to hammer out their differences.

How amazing would it have been for all of these men of letters — and frankly, anyone at that time — to watch a video conversation between Franklin and Voltaire about what they saw as the differences between the American and French revolutions?

The 21st-century version of the Royal Society could be the Substack network that we are just starting to build out today.

Giving those people of The Enlightenment the tools of our time would have dramatically accelerated the pace of innovation and spread their transformative ideas much farther for potentially bigger results. In the process, “the men of letters” would have expanded its constituencies and become “the people of posts.”

The point is that the 21st-century version of the Royal Society could well be the Substack network that we are just starting to build out today.

Humans have never seen such an amazing collection of communication tools all integrated into one place and optimized for iterating big ideas, innovating new concepts, and spreading the results around the world.

These tools have already attracted a critical mass of some of the smartest, most knowledgeable, most innovative people in America and beyond. And because the system is open to everyone, it could, and almost certainly will, attract many more people of that caliber from all genders, races, cultures, and backgrounds in the future.

The timing of the arrival of this optimal system for intellectual discussion and rapid innovation could not be better because, whether we are ready or not, we’re heading into The New Enlightenment.

We must rapidly figure out the new ways forward with AI and systems change

The premise of my relatively new series, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, is that we are witnessing the arrival of three world-historic general purpose technologies that will change life in profound ways. The first among equals is artificial intelligence, but we also have clean energy technologies and bioengineering.

The premise of my last essay is that these three technologies will create a world that is so different from any previous era that we must view it as a new civilization — one that includes fundamental system changes to the economy and government.

So, I looked back on the last time humans went through a civilization-scale change — during The Enlightenment — and drew out the strong parallels between their mega-inventions and ours, which you can see again in the graphic below.

The six mega-inventions of The Enlightenment compared to six that could supersede them in our time

Each of the mega-inventions of The Enlightenment is now causing problems (like climate change) that mean the invention needs to be somehow superseded in our time.

The problem is that we don’t know precisely how to use any of our replacement mega-inventions (those on the right side of the graphic) to create the world we want to see. We have some ideas about how they will probably work and how we could get them to scale up (particularly with regards to clean energies superseding carbon energies), but we really don’t know how the systems built on AI, bioengineering, and even some clean energy technologies could be optimized to ensure that they will work better for everyone over the long haul.

We have even less of an idea on how to evolve our current form of financial capitalism into some new form of sustainable capitalism that can spread wealth more equitably through society and avoid further harming the planet’s climate.

We are really at the starting point of assessing how to overcome the obvious limitations of representative democracy, which was designed 250 years ago. How could we better understand the true will of the majority of people and efficiently carry out effective government? The answer will probably have something to do with fully leveraging AI.

Our planet, filled with what we project will top out at 10 billion people, is facing catastrophic climate change. How do we get beyond the balkanization of the world through sovereign nation states to address that? We will almost certainly need some new forms of global governance.

We humans really need to figure out a lot of things very fast. Who are you gonna call? Where are you gonna look for answers?

At that early phase of ideation and innovation, you don’t look to elected officials, who have spent their lives focused on getting elected through the old systems. You don’t look to the established figures, who have climbed to the pinnacles of all the old institutions from elite universities to mainstream media to billionaire-backed think tanks, either.

At that early stage of ideation and innovation, you look to the intellectuals and entrepreneurs and out-of-the-box thinkers — those who are not constrained by the old world and are focused instead on the new one. You are looking for truly independent thinkers who can figure out the new ways forward that work better for everyone over the long haul.

And where do you find those kinds of people in the world of 2025?

On Substack.

Some historical lessons from The Enlightenment that shed light on what we might do today

As we get set to embark on our journey of civilizational-scale change, we might ponder what worked for those men of letters in The Enlightenment and what did not — and then think about how we might do better.

For one, these men exchanged lengthy letters and did not trade tweets. There were practical reasons for this — a letter might take two weeks to travel from London to Paris, so you better say what you needed to say in that one envelope — but the big new ideas they were deliberating also took time to fully explain, closely analyze, and discuss.

The same holds true today. You simply can’t lay out a big new idea about how to fundamentally rework the economy around AI in a single tweet or even a chain of a dozen tweets. Same with a 30-second TikTok video. Even an opinion writer for The New York Times must stick to an 800-word column. If you are a writer for The Atlantic, you are lucky to get 5,000 words for your one cover story a year.

Today, if you want to explore big ideas, you are much better off writing a Substack newsletter where you can write as long as you need to as frequently as you want.

Two, as you can deduce from the graphic below, the men of letters were a very international bunch despite the great rivalries of their respective countries. The formal members of the Royal Society were mostly English, with the occasional American, but they frequently interacted with the French, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Montesquieu.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who simultaneously yet independently invented calculus like Newton, was a German. Economist Adam Smith and philosopher David Hume were Scottish.

The men of letters collaborated across national borders even if the countries they lived in were at war. The same holds true for Substack today. Most readers have no idea where a writer comes from. What matters is the quality of their ideas.

This is a timeline of some of the key “men of letters” of The Enlightenment with those from the Royal Society marked in purple.

Three, the men of letters shared their ideas openly and built upon each other in ways that had never happened before. Look closely at the successive timelines in the graphic above, and you can see that the foundational ideas of the fundamental rights of man came first with Locke. Many of the French thinkers, including Voltaire and Rousseau, then developed the concepts more fully only for the ideas to culminate with Americans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

The evolution of the foundational concepts of representative democracy took decades, but it might have taken much longer if all the ideas and concepts had to be independently developed again and again.

Substack takes this openness to a whole new level with instantaneous publishing open to everyone for free or very little money.

The fourth point has to do with a negative lesson learned from The Enlightenment. In order to earn a living, the men of letters were often supported by the powers that be of their times. Many had sinecures from the monarchs or aristocrats of the various countries they lived within. Some were simply aristocrats who had the rare opportunity to think and write because they had inherited plenty of money.

The pool of people to become men of letters and think through big ideas was small, and very few of them were truly independent.

One of the key innovations that Substack added to the blog world was the ability to make money through scaling up micropayments from a broad readership. From a practical point of view, the platform makes earning a living from writing much easier than ever before.

From an editorial point of view, writers and thinkers on Substack are independent and beholden to no one. They don’t have to beg a billionaire for a grant or constrain what they say because they get a paycheck from the corporate media. They can say what they actually think at this critical time.

And finally, as mentioned before, the men of letters were all men and all white. Part of that was due to the social norms of that time, which we now see were unjust if not immoral. But part of it was a natural outcome of having only white men underwriting the whole operation.

Substack is not constrained by those ancient norms or that kind of underwriting — it comes as close as you can to an intellectual meritocracy, allowing us to hear from a wide range of humans at a time when we need the best ideas to quickly rise to the top.

Never bet against human ingenuity, no matter what challenges we face in The New Enlightenment

One of the things I have learned over my career in futures thinking is that most people underestimate the impact of innovation on what lies ahead. They look at what we know now, see the challenges we face in the future, and conclude that we are screwed. We don’t know how to solve them.

They don’t factor in that we may not know how to solve those challenges now, but humans are extremely good at problem solving and driving progress through continuous innovation.

To take one compelling metric, we have several hundred million knowledge workers with four-year university degrees living and working in the world today.

We also have new communications tools like Substack that allow a significant portion of that educated populace to engage in the work of ideating and iterating ways to solve all our challenges and figure out the various pieces of the new civilization that needs to emerge throughout this century.

Plus we have artificial intelligence and other world-historic new tools to augment those humans and accelerate their efforts in ways that we are only now starting to imagine, let alone understand.

Never bet against human ingenuity leading to transformative ideas that can change the world in fundamental ways. We did it during The Enlightenment of the 18th century with far fewer brains and inferior tools, and we can do it again during The New Enlightenment of the 21st century.

To my fellow members of the Royal Society of Substack, it’s time to get to work.

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