bu·reauc·ra·cy

noun (not the DAO, this time)

https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

A system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives.

Over time, we have remodeled the meaning of this word to describe slow situations and processes in the administrative sphere, but let us return to its pure meaning and, above all, keep an eye on the part where it emphasizes relevant decisions being taken by state officials. Historically, a bureaucracy was a government administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials.

Let's start from the beginning: The Roman Empire, the post-republican period of ancient Roman civilization, characterized by an autocratic form of government and its entire military structure. A militarized society means a strategically organized society, which means that the division of sectors, positions, places of permissions, hierarchies, subdivisions, governments and institutes are part of an ancient Roman concept. No society was as involved with the concept of bureaucracy as the Roman Empire. And in its initial phase, especially in its comprehensive process of governmental militarization, many hierarchies and rules were created to be a constitutive part of an Administrative Structure. But when placing this in a public system of governance, Corruption became an extremely difficult problem – when we have a rigid system, everything that corrupts it becomes almost uncontrollable since the very rigidity of the system does not allow the malleability to deal with problems that are outside its own structure – administrative complications gave rise to bribery, and bribery was a facilitator (and accelerator) at some points of governance – but a facilitator for which of the interests?

At this point, we can already understand that corruption is the child of bureaucracy. After all, corruption only makes sense, philosophical and semantic, if there is something to corrupt.

The Roman Republic, despite managing to conquer large parts of the Mediterranean, had relatively light bureaucracy. The bureaucratization of the Roman state, a long and slow process, can be traced to the Roman Empire, when there was a more systemic effort to provide a more centralized administration of the provinces. After the fall of Constantinople in 1204 to the crusaders, the centralized bureaucratic structure of the empire suffered a blow from which it was unable to make a full recovery.

In the Republic of Ireland, the story was kinda different: when the Republic became independent, they began to see the Celtic organization – structurally tribal and configured in councils and not in hierarchical unitary authorities, which caused the elite to lose its control. This implies that the social organization not created by a central authority figure did not support external authorities.

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions (…)”

Leaving 500 BC and jumping to 1689, when Locke published The Second Treatise of Government, that the purpose of government is to safeguard the natural rights of man, Locke defends that these rights belong to him in the state of nature. And he aimed to prove that among human beings is the right to property, including bureaucratic property.

Summarizing, in a drastic way, what gives property to man, for Locke, is his rational capacity and work since work is responsible for creating the property of a being and the same principle applies to land and goods; land becomes a man's property when he has fenced and cultivated it.

So far, we have interesting things, right? Bureaucracy, rigid systems, corruption, and work. But one element is missing: the economy. Let's get on board with this concept.

A few years before John Locke published The Second Treatise of Government, the first known shares were issued in 1602 on the Amsterdam stock exchange, the first public offering of shares took place. The Dutch West India Company received a charter granting it a monopoly on trade with the western colonies belonging to the Seven Provinces in the West Indies (the Caribbean) as well as on the slave trade in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. The company could also operate in West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and in the Americas, including the Pacific Ocean, and the eastern part of New Guinea.

The company – at the end of the day – was an economic-political move to finance operations against Spain, Portugal, and England, which also had a keen interest in trade with the colonies. Despite having carried out the first public offering of shares as a political movement, they ended up getting it right in the advent of what is now part of the history of the economy.

It is important to highlight how The Just War Theory, which has its origins in the thought of Cicero, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius, makes a little sense when we see the unfolding of the economy and governance arising from a succession of conflicts of interests. For Saint Augustine, war is an extension of the act of governing, without all wars being morally justified.

That is, the purchase of shares was directly or indirectly related to participation that involved decisive political interests, which broke the bubble of pure economic speculation. The act of buying shares in the Dutch West India Company meant financing a war movement. Throughout the history of companies – especially when we talk about the 1929 crisis – this was lost. We saw pure speculation and participation involving political and participatory interests going down the drain. Here, the sense of community is lost. After all, what creates a community is the mutual political interest. It is the bureaucratic organization that ultimately dictates the community in which you are inserted.

The author who strongly recognizes the concept of governance is Ronald Coase, a British man who published an article entitled The Nature of the Firm in 1937. The use of the concept in the work sphere did not trigger major debates. Americanized economic movements around speculation were still trying to recover from the crash. But Ronald was revived in the 1970s when governance was used to describe business conduct operations, mainly when the firm develops its internal networks or tribes (remember the Celts?) and questions internal hierarchies and central authority figures.

Does questioning central authority figures ring a bell? I imagine (and hope) that this sentence brings you to the word decentralization. And here, we begin blockchain technology as a fundamental part of the history of bureaucracy.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person or people who created Bitcoin. And as part of the implementation, Nakamoto also developed the first blockchain database in October 2008.

Initially, Bitcoin was considered the first fully functional DAO, as it has a pre-programmed set of rules, works autonomously, and is coordinated through a distributed consensus protocol. After all, what characterizes a Decentralized Autonomous Organization is its distributed and autonomous operation. Bitcoin's unique ecosystem, made up of peers and users, stands in stark contrast to most human organizations. The reason for this is inherent in blockchain functionality, the advancement in computational science, that is, at the heart of Bitcoin. By their very architecture, public blockchains require local structures (native bitcoins) to function. These bitcoins are created (mined) and reward miners, or obtained as a service fee, in exchange for transaction verification and network protection. This incentive created by native bitcoins is what keeps the network as a whole safe, including ensuring everything that happens to the network over time.

The blockchain records information (such as amounts transacted, who sent it, who received it, and when this transaction was made), and these records of information and interaction are the integrity of the bureaucracy over time. It shows that transparency is one of the main attributes of blockchain technology.

Here we have interesting things to analyze:

1. The return of political interests (self-custody and privacy) walking along with the monetary system

2. Administrative decentralization in practice supported by encrypted ethics (have you read my article about ethics?)

3. A non-rigid system (which implies the application, often unilateral, of severe rules) but mathematical and optional. That is, corruption is not tolerated (or at least it ceases to make sense)

The idea of ​​interests is resumed by the simple fact of non-obligation to use. Decentralization starts, above all, from the initial choice of participation in a given system.

Decentralization delivers power into the hands of all those who participate in any given process. This means that participation is no longer passive (participation that only experiences the consequences of a decision) and becomes active participation (participation that decides and also experiences these decisions). When companies engage in discussions about human nature, they become obsolete compared to the discussion of how a coding methodology will perform. That is, the trust and reliability factor is no longer necessary, because ethics was inserted in codes and will be also executed by it. The programmed ethics makes room for technical discussions, methodology, the benefits, and no longer on failures of human nature, intermediaries and their conflicts (or possible delicate errors in negotiation). That is, blockchain technology is a modifying part of the history of bureaucracy, as it remodels the ethics that surround organizational and administrative structures and the way we deal with our political and economic interests (before only economic).

The hierarchy of the traditional market began its process of losing strength when The DAO, in 2016, started raising funds with investors to become the first decentralized Venture Capital in the world. The DAO is conceived as a set of contracts between the people who are part of this organization, using the Ethereum blockchain and – consequently – Smart Contracts. Then there are relevant DAOs like Maker DAO, Uniswap, ENS, and many others. But the history of bureaucracy does not repeat itself: today, we can see protocols of bribes taking over the DAO market. However, it is interesting to analyze that cryptography contains its greatest enemy and uses it as a voting incentive. The corruption was already aggregated and reshaped.

The term "bureaucracy" originated in the French language: it combines the French word bureau – desk or office – with the Greek word κράτος (kratos) – rule or political power.

Say hi to Bureaugraphy.

bu·reauc·ra·cy

noun (not the DAO, this time)

https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

A system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives.

Over time, we have remodeled the meaning of this word to describe slow situations and processes in the administrative sphere, but let us return to its pure meaning and, above all, keep an eye on the part where it emphasizes relevant decisions being taken by state officials. Historically, a bureaucracy was a government administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials.

Let's start from the beginning: The Roman Empire, the post-republican period of ancient Roman civilization, characterized by an autocratic form of government and its entire military structure. A militarized society means a strategically organized society, which means that the division of sectors, positions, places of permissions, hierarchies, subdivisions, governments and institutes are part of an ancient Roman concept. No society was as involved with the concept of bureaucracy as the Roman Empire. And in its initial phase, especially in its comprehensive process of governmental militarization, many hierarchies and rules were created to be a constitutive part of an Administrative Structure. But when placing this in a public system of governance, Corruption became an extremely difficult problem – when we have a rigid system, everything that corrupts it becomes almost uncontrollable since the very rigidity of the system does not allow the malleability to deal with problems that are outside its own structure – administrative complications gave rise to bribery, and bribery was a facilitator (and accelerator) at some points of governance – but a facilitator for which of the interests?

At this point, we can already understand that corruption is the child of bureaucracy. After all, corruption only makes sense, philosophical and semantic, if there is something to corrupt.

The Roman Republic, despite managing to conquer large parts of the Mediterranean, had relatively light bureaucracy. The bureaucratization of the Roman state, a long and slow process, can be traced to the Roman Empire, when there was a more systemic effort to provide a more centralized administration of the provinces. After the fall of Constantinople in 1204 to the crusaders, the centralized bureaucratic structure of the empire suffered a blow from which it was unable to make a full recovery.

In the Republic of Ireland, the story was kinda different: when the Republic became independent, they began to see the Celtic organization – structurally tribal and configured in councils and not in hierarchical unitary authorities, which caused the elite to lose its control. This implies that the social organization not created by a central authority figure did not support external authorities.

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions (…)”

Leaving 500 BC and jumping to 1689, when Locke published The Second Treatise of Government, that the purpose of government is to safeguard the natural rights of man, Locke defends that these rights belong to him in the state of nature. And he aimed to prove that among human beings is the right to property, including bureaucratic property.

Summarizing, in a drastic way, what gives property to man, for Locke, is his rational capacity and work since work is responsible for creating the property of a being and the same principle applies to land and goods; land becomes a man's property when he has fenced and cultivated it.

So far, we have interesting things, right? Bureaucracy, rigid systems, corruption, and work. But one element is missing: the economy. Let's get on board with this concept.

A few years before John Locke published The Second Treatise of Government, the first known shares were issued in 1602 on the Amsterdam stock exchange, the first public offering of shares took place. The Dutch West India Company received a charter granting it a monopoly on trade with the western colonies belonging to the Seven Provinces in the West Indies (the Caribbean) as well as on the slave trade in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. The company could also operate in West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and in the Americas, including the Pacific Ocean, and the eastern part of New Guinea.

The company – at the end of the day – was an economic-political move to finance operations against Spain, Portugal, and England, which also had a keen interest in trade with the colonies. Despite having carried out the first public offering of shares as a political movement, they ended up getting it right in the advent of what is now part of the history of the economy.

It is important to highlight how The Just War Theory, which has its origins in the thought of Cicero, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius, makes a little sense when we see the unfolding of the economy and governance arising from a succession of conflicts of interests. For Saint Augustine, war is an extension of the act of governing, without all wars being morally justified.

That is, the purchase of shares was directly or indirectly related to participation that involved decisive political interests, which broke the bubble of pure economic speculation. The act of buying shares in the Dutch West India Company meant financing a war movement. Throughout the history of companies – especially when we talk about the 1929 crisis – this was lost. We saw pure speculation and participation involving political and participatory interests going down the drain. Here, the sense of community is lost. After all, what creates a community is the mutual political interest. It is the bureaucratic organization that ultimately dictates the community in which you are inserted.

The author who strongly recognizes the concept of governance is Ronald Coase, a British man who published an article entitled The Nature of the Firm in 1937. The use of the concept in the work sphere did not trigger major debates. Americanized economic movements around speculation were still trying to recover from the crash. But Ronald was revived in the 1970s when governance was used to describe business conduct operations, mainly when the firm develops its internal networks or tribes (remember the Celts?) and questions internal hierarchies and central authority figures.

Does questioning central authority figures ring a bell? I imagine (and hope) that this sentence brings you to the word decentralization. And here, we begin blockchain technology as a fundamental part of the history of bureaucracy.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person or people who created Bitcoin. And as part of the implementation, Nakamoto also developed the first blockchain database in October 2008.

Initially, Bitcoin was considered the first fully functional DAO, as it has a pre-programmed set of rules, works autonomously, and is coordinated through a distributed consensus protocol. After all, what characterizes a Decentralized Autonomous Organization is its distributed and autonomous operation. Bitcoin's unique ecosystem, made up of peers and users, stands in stark contrast to most human organizations. The reason for this is inherent in blockchain functionality, the advancement in computational science, that is, at the heart of Bitcoin. By their very architecture, public blockchains require local structures (native bitcoins) to function. These bitcoins are created (mined) and reward miners, or obtained as a service fee, in exchange for transaction verification and network protection. This incentive created by native bitcoins is what keeps the network as a whole safe, including ensuring everything that happens to the network over time.

The blockchain records information (such as amounts transacted, who sent it, who received it, and when this transaction was made), and these records of information and interaction are the integrity of the bureaucracy over time. It shows that transparency is one of the main attributes of blockchain technology.

Here we have interesting things to analyze:

1. The return of political interests (self-custody and privacy) walking along with the monetary system

2. Administrative decentralization in practice supported by encrypted ethics (have you read my article about ethics?)

3. A non-rigid system (which implies the application, often unilateral, of severe rules) but mathematical and optional. That is, corruption is not tolerated (or at least it ceases to make sense)

The idea of ​​interests is resumed by the simple fact of non-obligation to use. Decentralization starts, above all, from the initial choice of participation in a given system.

Decentralization delivers power into the hands of all those who participate in any given process. This means that participation is no longer passive (participation that only experiences the consequences of a decision) and becomes active participation (participation that decides and also experiences these decisions). When companies engage in discussions about human nature, they become obsolete compared to the discussion of how a coding methodology will perform. That is, the trust and reliability factor is no longer necessary, because ethics was inserted in codes and will be also executed by it. The programmed ethics makes room for technical discussions, methodology, the benefits, and no longer on failures of human nature, intermediaries and their conflicts (or possible delicate errors in negotiation). That is, blockchain technology is a modifying part of the history of bureaucracy, as it remodels the ethics that surround organizational and administrative structures and the way we deal with our political and economic interests (before only economic).

The hierarchy of the traditional market began its process of losing strength when The DAO, in 2016, started raising funds with investors to become the first decentralized Venture Capital in the world. The DAO is conceived as a set of contracts between the people who are part of this organization, using the Ethereum blockchain and – consequently – Smart Contracts. Then there are relevant DAOs like Maker DAO, Uniswap, ENS, and many others. But the history of bureaucracy does not repeat itself: today, we can see protocols of bribes taking over the DAO market. However, it is interesting to analyze that cryptography contains its greatest enemy and uses it as a voting incentive. The corruption was already aggregated and reshaped.

The term "bureaucracy" originated in the French language: it combines the French word bureau – desk or office – with the Greek word κράτος (kratos) – rule or political power.

Say hi to Bureaugraphy.