Society – Page 3 – Toby Weston

Singularity Economics—The Remedy

Broadcast #2 – part two of my recent Monkey Logic essay, read or listen on Youtube:

Singularity Economics-The Remedy

Power is a kind of gravity. Instead of curving space and time, it warps laws and bends rules. As I wrote in my last broadcast:
“Human laws, even when they start off well-intentioned, always become corrupted and broken as they are hollowed out by bad faith actors…”
Given the chance, people will bend the rules to their own benefit. For most of us, the law is ‘Read Only’, but those who can accumulate enough power get ‘Write Permissions’. If you are rich enough the law is malleable. For a real-world example, take the manifestly harmful ruse concocted by a few Billionaires to assert equivalence between money and speech, granting freedom of speech to corporations, a.k.a. corporate persons, allowing our jolly band of Billionaires to use these well-funded proxies as battering rams to push for even more benign governance. Corporations are not real people but we let them use their wealth to lobby against the laws that keep them in check, this can’t be a good idea?! It is like giving an AI a gun or putting the psychopaths in charge of the asylum.
In this collapsing world, our institutions have been co-opted. Surviving the game of late-stage-capitalism is like playing Monopoly where whoever is winning, not only gets to collect outlandish rents every time you land on their Mayfairs [Broadwalks] and Park Lanes [Park Places] but also get to rewrite the rules too; letting them confiscate your stations and utilities just before they land on you, so you never get your hands on any of their greasy yellow notes.
If we want to build things of lasting value - and not watch as they are looted by the type of kleptocrat who predictably ends up running things - we need to tamper-proof our system of rules.
In the last instalment, I claimed that rooting systems of governance in the hardwired properties of the universe helps put laws beyond self-serving meddling. For example, using gold for money is less vulnerable to corruption than using ephemeral zeros and ones. Of course, even using precious metals people can and could cheat; lead coins were plated in gold, but at least the swindlers had to work hard at these scams, now they just need to spam the ‘create money’ key on the special keyboard all plutocrats get sent when they reach the magic ten billion-dollar goal.
The problem with using reality as the underpinnings of law, e.g. violence or scarcity, is that such laws will be crude. In version 1.0 base reality-the bare bones out-of-the-box universe-law defaults to sticks and stones, the smartest most powerful monkey gets all the toys, food, and sex. But, and this should not be forgotten, a small consolation prize for the losers is that in base reality, no matter how powerful the winners get, they will never become actual Gods.

So, building the components of civilization on rules baked into the universe can help reduce meddling, but capturing all our aspirations for fairness and efficiency within the universe’s default laws of violence and power is a tall order.
Instead, we need to take the best of our human system-in an idealized world, this would be our collective vision of how the world should work-and bake them into an immutable synthetic substrate.

Recap:
The substrate for our current economic system is money + our global laws and regulations + physical infrastructure (i.e. roads, the internet, etc).
We need a new substrate equally complex and nuanced but resistant to meddling.

Lucky for us I have just the thing, I call it the Mesh.
Let’s define a few core concepts. I am sure you have heard of Bitcoin, but if not, think of Bitcoin as digital gold. Like gold, Bitcoin is scarce. Unlike gold, its scarcity does not come from the laws of physics, but from specially designed algorithms built upon tamper-proof cryptographic concepts. Its scarcity is artificial, but once set, its rules cannot be changed because they are protected by cryptography, a.k.a. by math [so, I suppose, physics after all]. This is a far-from-complete description of Bitcoin, but in a nutshell, if someone tries to meddle, the math does not work, you get an error, payment rejected. Bitcoin is nothing more than its algorithms, and the way the algorithms are embedded in math makes them inviolate. This gives Bitcoin its reputation. It’s unhackable because to crack Bitcoin, ludicrous amounts of computation are required - think several universe-sized computers running for billions of years. The scarcity of computation gives Bitcoin its value, just as the scarcity of gold gives Krugerrands theirs.
There are no shortcuts. No huge deposits of unattended computation hidden off the continental shelf waiting for deep-sea rigs to come and suck them up. Unlike gold, you cannot fly a starship into space and drag back a steaming pile of Bitcoin.
The only way Bitcoin enters the economy is when it is ‘mined’-
– perhaps this conjures images of nerds in hardhats burrowing through layers of data to extract precious glinting Bitcoins-in-the-rough, but what ‘crypto-miners’ are actually doing is the dry mundane task of verifying payment transactions on an immutable ledger. Crypto-miners are running the math that is Bitcoin on the computers in their bedrooms. In return, they get paid every time they ‘mine’ a ‘block’. This is how the currency incentivises humans to do its work. This bootstrapping is the real genius of a cryptocurrency. Nobody has to raise capital from investors to build Bitcoin’s [or any other cryptocurrency’s] banking back-end. The computer infrastructure required to run the Bitcoin network, and all the geeks and nerds necessary to maintain it, bootstraps spontaneously as people rationally identify an opportunity to earn money and choose to run its software on their computers.
People flock in, momentum builds, the currency’s reputation grows, people gain confidence and the coin’s value starts to appreciate. Ten years ago, the first Bitcoin purchase swapped Ten Thousand Bitcoin for two pizzas, that Bitcoin would be worth a hundred million Euros in today’s money.
Incidentally, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) believes Cryptocurrency is the future of Money. Right now they are busy building their own version of Bitcoin with blackjack and hookers… a.k.a. cross-border controls and political censorship. The PBoC’s Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) initiative is building up its strength, waiting next to the bed of the crotchety old US Dollar which seems to have developed a temperature and nasty dry cough lately…
Bitcoin’s reputation, brand recognition, and autonomy from preying central banks, pretty much guarantees it a place in our future economy. I am certain Bitcoin will be around for the next few centuries, just like TCP/IP, SC2, and .txt, it is a standard that is not going anywhere. I am hodlering onto mine forever - or at least until the price reaches the moon. But before you log on to Coinbase and buy you some Bitcoin, Dogecoin-or whatever state-sponsored, watered down, bureaucracy riddled, de-fanged, regulated, shade your government will soon be peddling to you-cryptocurrency alone cannot deliver us the Singularity economics we need. Bitcoin is money, but we need more than money, we need laws and infrastructure too. Luckily Bitcoin is the innovation equivalent of using re-bar construction technology to upgrade your village from mud huts to concrete huts, entirely missing the opportunity to build sky-scrapers another ninety-nine stories into the sky. The technology of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency can do so much more than be Money, so let’s see if it can help with the other core facilities we need our substrate to provide, i.e:
– Communication (infrastructure)
– Record-keeping (data)
– Computation (rules)

Let us start with Communication.
Imagine a small technical widget that turns data - zeros and ones - into electrical beeps like an old-school modem. Let’s use off the shelf circuitry, something like an Arduino, running a program. This widget should be able to send data over wifi, or down a network cable, it will send beeps and chirps through a speaker or down an aux cable into a ham radio set which can boost the signal across an ocean. Let’s call this widget a node. These nodes can decode signals the same way they encode them. We can imagine a node sending packets of data to a twin a thousand miles away which decodes the radio waves it plucks out of the aether and pipes the data to a nearby computer. These two nodes swapping data over long distances are a sliver of Internet. The hardware is standard and off the shelf, it can be bought easily and cheaply. The software is free and easy to download. Setting up a node will be trivial for anybody even moderately nerdy.
Would you want to set up a node? Perhaps as a geeky hobby, you would be even more likely if the Mesh paid you for every byte of data that passed over your node by allowing you to mine a nugget of sweet, sweet MeshCoin. This same incentive system is how the Bitcoin network became the biggest supercomputer on the planet. People will collaborate to build the Mesh for self-interested reasons.
The Mesh will carry data, and customers will pay to send their data over it. They will pay in MeshCoin. The network will grow. MeshCoin will gain credibility and value. Its value will be real, based upon the tangible service of sending data. Pretty soon people will be launching satellites and laying fiberoptic cable to route data and so they can mine even more MeshCoin.

Next up, our new economic system needs Record-Keeping, Data-storage for all the documents, programs, records, DNA sequences, patents, dick-pics and what not. The Mesh will already be a bunch of hardware nodes distributed across the planet, it will be easy to add an old disk to each node to create a distributed peer-2-peer storage cloud. The MeshCoin currency requires strong cryptography, so we only need to add a bit of computer code to extend the encryption to fragments of files scattered across the disks. Our cryptography will ensure only the owner or those authorised by her can view or edit.

With money, data-storage, and communications, our Mesh-based economics platform now only needs rules a.k.a. Computation, to become a fully specced challenger to incumbent economics 1.0. Computation can be distributed to the processors on the Mesh’s Nodes the same as we distributed data storage and communications, but it is true that protecting running algorithms is much harder. A program that can receive secure input and deliver private output, even when it is running on a remote and potentially insecure processor, is very tricky to develop, but it can be done. How this works is far too complex to go into here [and not just because I don’t understand it!] but the technology is based around something called a SNARK: Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge. Rules encoded into algorithms that can execute without the risk of meddling are called Smart Contracts. A Smart Contract running in SNARK Capsule will give private reliable answers without exposing input or output allowing programs to be run anywhere on the Mesh, even if the data and output should be private. Smart Contracts do not need to be enforced by police or mafia because just like cryptocurrency transaction they either run or they don’t, there are no grey areas. There is no negotiation, if the terms of a Smart Contract are satisfied, the contract will execute:
You give me the MeshCoin, I email you the pdf of my book.
You give me the password, I open the airlock.
You give me the launch-codes… etc

This gives us Money, Communications, Record-keeping, and Computation. With these facilities, the Mesh will create an inviolate substrate upon which commerce can be conducted away from the grubbing fingers of the 0.001%. That is not to say they can’t play, they can, they should, it’s just that on this board they can’t cheat; nothing will open for biased interpretation; there will be no chummy regulators; no network owners with admin privileges; no roll-backs; no backing out of deals; no deleting data; no preferential treatment; no oligods capable of miracles. Just like a Bitcoin payment, once a Smart Contract transaction has completed there is nothing anybody will be able to do to cancel it. This incorruptibility will thwart the kleptocrats who are used to converting money into power over the system of law.
People will found companies native to the Mesh. Forget hosting your IT on Microsoft’s Azure or Amazon’s AWS, the Mesh’s self-sustaining cloud will never take your data hostage to turn the thumbscrews on price. Nobody owns the Mesh. Prices are set by supply and demand. There are no shareholders to keep happy, only employees -i.e. the miners - who install and maintain the Mesh’s physical nodes. Companies will happily delegate their IT to the Mesh because it will be cheap, reliable, and free from arbitrary regulation.
This is not to say that the companies running on the Mesh can’t make money. Many of them will, immediately! Digital companies that don’t own assets will be entirely at home on the Mesh. Somebody will create something like Uber, i.e. a program deployed onto the Mesh to match drivers to passengers. The Mesh will provide payment services, connectivity, and server backend. There will be no need to buy infrastructure upfront because the Mesh will absorb your companies digital workload as it grows. If things start getting tight, the price of processing or data transfer will go up, this will incentivise people to add nodes to the network, and cost will stabilise.
By design, the Mesh ecology will be impossible to regulate externally, but there is no reason regulation can’t be built directly into the Mesh’s algorithms at inception - if that’s what its anarchist architects want. Taxation, inflation, and even redistribution can be hard-coded into the core algorithms. Ideally, these will capture the aspirations of our species towards fairness and equality.
Let democracy decide our economies regulation, then let’s entrust it to tamper-proof algorithms protected by math to execute.
The Mesh is a robust, distributed alternative to the mess of corruptible, woolly narratives we’ve dressed up as law since graduating from hard-wired Monkey Logic a million years ago.

The Mesh is the economics of the future-
Smart Contracts will replace lawyers,
MeshCoin will be the world’s reserve currency.
The Mesh is what economics will look like on Mars;
this is what a Singularity feels like.
Hold tight!

Monkey Logic no.7 – Means to an End

Some things are just that; a means to an end.
Sex for example. Sex is an intermediate step in the process of reproduction; but in the heat of the moment, as one is energetically pursuing the means, it is easy to let the end — a demanding, screaming ball of potential humanity — entirely slip one’s mind. Chimps, and certainly Bonobos, make the same error. They are all at it all the time, implementing every possible topological variation, most of which are logistically unlikely to have anything to do with reproduction. Pursuing the means, not the end.

Money is another means. Money is not happiness. It can’t buy you love, but it can be exchanged for things that make survival or reproduction more likely — e.g. food or sports cars. But most of our waking lives are lived as if Money was the end itself.

Money is not happiness.
The map is not the territory.
The stock market is not the economy.

Apes don’t fetishize money as we Saps do. This is not because they are too dim to understand it. They are quite capable of grasping it as a means to an end. This is witnessed through the sad story of Chantek the Orangutan. Chantek was brought up by humans at the University of Tennessee. He was taught sign-language, attended class, and was introduced to money in the form of washers he could exchange for ice-cream. Unfortunately, as he reached puberty, he became a little bit too frisky for a university sociology department and had to be moved to a far less stimulating environment — I told you it was a sad story. He was locked in his cage for many years and there he frustrated his jailors by regularly using his incredible monkey-strength to twist open the bolts of his enclosure to collect washers. It is possible that Chantek idolized the washers themselves, but I suspect it is far more likely that he was just acquiring the means, hoping one day to be in a position to exchange them again for the end — ice cream.

Money is not an end. It is a story. Only if we all believe, is it able to perform its function and facilitate the transfer of resources, labour, and cognition. This is not to be disparaging. Money has proven to be a very useful story which has enabled us Saps to achieve indistinguishable-from-magic improvements in the routine of our daily lives, but it is not an end. It should also never be taken for granted. Every now and again, people tend to wake up, look around in confusion at all the mangy notes overflowing their wheelbarrows or stuffed into the suitcases littered around their apartments, and wonder what the heck to do with all this suddenly meaningless waste paper—and, more importantly, how they are going to pay for dinner.

At our current point in the money-cycle story-arc, governments are squirting cash about like foam cannons at an Ibiza beach rave. The plot holes in the story have become so glaring that even a casual audience now has difficulty continuing to suspend its disbelief. Typically when a story-arc ‘jumps the shark’ like this, the viewers move on to something new; but this is much easier with a Netflix series than with an intersubjective shared narrative which supports a tower of leveraged obligations rising out of the primal jungle into the teetering heights of almost-godhood…

Money is a means to an end. Poor people know this because it is almost immediately transformed into real things like shoes and food.

Ultra-rich people don’t understand this anymore because shoes and food just are; like air.

Money ceases to be a means because a surplus of everything makes the connection between money and value tenuous. Money becomes the end when it is the only way you can differentiate yourself from those pretenders down the road…

This is supposed to be a bright upbeat issue of Monkey Logic, so here goes for a happy ending —

We live in a period of ‘late-stage-capitalism’. The ageing system’s loopholes have been so thoroughly excavated, and the current system is so hollowed out, that it is no longer structurally sound. Its rickety nature shows up as maladies like the massive and unjustifiable wealth disparity between the richest and the poorest; or the suppression of innovation — technological or social — by an inchoate cabal of loyalty signalling stooges all silently conspiring to suppress any change which might threaten their shadowy masters of capital. Think cigarettes and petrol engines!

When it first occurred to me that money was on the way out — probably around 2007 when the previous mini-cycle was wrapping up its season-arc with a sub-prime mortgage finale — I was a little freaked out. Since then, however, I have noticed the first beams and struts of a new system being put into place. This act is coming to an end and the set of the next scene is already being constructed in the wings — I know I am being rather free with my metaphors here.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) says we should pay everybody a basic living wage. People used to laugh—who will pay? But this was before printing a Trillion Euro’s became so mundane that it is now unworthy of even mentioning.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) goes further, suggesting that printing money is actually fine, as long as real people who do stuff, have a use for it. When it starts piling up in wheelbarrows — or ideally a little before then — MMT says just raise taxes.

Both MMT and UBI can work together to feed money into the system bottom-up—poor people first—which seems more sensible to me than letting already rich people magic it up and then spend most of it on bonuses to themselves or in buying more stocks of the banks they already own and which incidentally are the same corporate-persons whose incestuous, nepotistic relationships with government allows them to magic the money up in the first place. Whatever trickle is left, after the ghoulish servants of undead capital have slathered themselves in its greasy green caress, can finally, grudgingly, be loaned, with interest, to real people who actually need it to feed themselves or start companies which build spaceships or windmills.

This is the tortuous route that money must take today to get into the hands of the people who need it. It’s like those wildlife films of wildebeest fording a river full of crocodiles. Some money makes it to the other side — across actual shop counters — but that’s only because so much of it was plunged into the river that the corporate-crocodiles couldn’t physically snaffle it all.

Money, trying to make the hazardous journey into your wallet.

Most of the money today is with the ultra-rich, so most money is not used for its original purpose of purchasing stuff. It is used instead to status-signal and compare net-worth high-scores. Because of where it sits, the value of most of the world’s money comes not from its scarcity or utility, but from the media’s traumatic, PTSD inducing daily reminders to the super-rich of what happens to people who don’t have it.

When UBI takes care of the people at the bottom, perhaps the people at the top will be a little less terrified of losing some of their hoards.

Money, or at least fiat currency, is so last-century. It is time for something new, but this time we need to be clear on what the end is before we try and come up with a new means; otherwise, we could just listen to Chantek and go with Monkey Logic.

Monkey Logic no.6 – Tough Love!

In the tooth and claw world of Monkey Politics, we might expect it to be the biggest and baddest ape who always ascends to alpha-hood; it is true that often a bullying thug will get ‘elected’ to power-

Note: apes choose their leaders in pretty much the same way as humans do, i.e. with public shows of support, presenting of gifts, and offers of sex.

-The troop’s new Tough-Monkey will terrify his enemies with shock and awe acts of violence and authority. Neighbouring troops will quail in fear. Sadly, the reign of terror is usually pointed inwards too, and the weak and out of favour in the bully’s home troop will also suffer.

More often than we would expect though, it will not be an egotistical thug who ascends, but a wise and friendly contender who is helped by his allies to climb the greasy-branch. A successful Love-Monkey’s authority will not come from threats and fear, but from a coalition network built on trust and reciprocity.

Monkeys are not moral philosophers. These two styles of Ape governance are a record of what works—Darwin has taken care of all the strategies that don’t—and not abstract utopias thought-up by inscrutable bearded academics pontificating about how the world ‘should’ look.

The politics of Love-Monkey and Tough-monkey—the embryonic Left and Right—are both valid answers to the question of how to structure a primate society.

Monkey-left believes that all apes are inherently and fundamentally good, and if you treat them with respect and dignity, they will reciprocate and behave in an acceptable manner.
Monkey-right, on the other hand, understands a tooth and claw world. It knows that when the shit hits the palm, the neighbouring troop will always be looking for an advantage and even unsupervised members of the home troop are watching for an opportunity to cheat and steal.

Taking these ideologies to human extremes:
Right sees a hard-knocks jungle out there,
while Left wants a garden of unconditional love.

Any parent knows that neither extreme is viable.
Too much love without tough discipline builds mollycoddled, indignant, tantrum-prone children—who will probably grow up to take positions as entitled social sciences professors.

Tough discipline, with too little love, will give rise to a brood of cowed, uncreative monsters who will one day make daddy proud by becoming bullying sociopathic CEOs.

Listening to the Monkey within, we recognise that we actually need a mix of both: leaders who are realists and accept the world’s inclement truths, while still possessing enough compassion to protect us from that beastly base reality.

Tough, without the Love, is just survival of the thuggish.
Love, without a dose of tough, only suffices to pave our paths with the fragile good-intentions of wishful thinking.

Success depends on a mix. A society run on only unconditional love will eventually be eradicated by any violent neighbour who sees their world a little less rosy; just as any society ruled by authoritarian tough guys will inevitably become irrelevant as the free-flowing creativity of the peoples around them produces better ways of doing stuff—including napping flint and sharpening sticks…

But I’m repeating myself!
We know all this!
Even Monkey knows this!

So why do we spend all our time fighting about whether Red or Blue is best?

If this was a Disney film, it would probably come back to the pantomime troop of evil baboons hiding behind the curtain of palm fronds… the ones expertly playing one side of chimps against the other so that they can steal all the bananas… [you know who I’m talking about].

Stop wasting time bickering folks!
Accept Tough-Love!
Its Monkey logic!

To paraphrase the economist Walter Williams, ‘Dispassionate analysis [Tough], enables Compassionate policies [Love].’