Upon reading In The Balance, one naturally spends a few minutes reflecting on how they'd choose differently and cut this quandary as only a mortal of insubordinate intelligence can. I recall that we live within thermodynamic lightcone of Earth orbiting Sol, with some Jovian auspice under a sparse stellar neighborhood. Life has persisted despite all the physics eating it all the while, and our species has persisted enough to record our journey with varying degrees of expiration. It seems right, upon acquiring The Artifact Which Grants Mastery Over The Universe, that we are best served by the bounded chaos just impotent enough for our mote of order to endure beyond our imagination.
Naturally, humanity is an exceptional hyperstructure of pattern-finders which discover information technology that outpaces the second law of thermodynamics. However, humanity is cursed with the gift of storytelling a fashionable Mastery Over The Universe which does not and should not exist.
Now, it is worth noting that Postwar Keynesianism, as well as precursors like the paradox of thrift, are part of a revolution driven by industrial technology. How poetic that humanity conceded the scale of artisanship to interchangeable parts within an international system of units, and the abundance from scientific discovery allowed us to thrive beyond famine and disease. Keynesianism is valid as a JIT principle, the fiscal stimulus to manage aggregate demand, create jobs, and drive growth, provided that the monetary policy is stable and the technology is diffused, such as the public symposia and free licensure of Bell Labs further than market forces.
But this leaves out a critical foundation: any society consists of family structures absorbing many imperceptible shocks, perhaps even more accurately, every society consists of informal risk-pooling networks of humans. A "high-trust society" absorbs subsistent shocks with pooled liquidity, labor substitution, in-kind transfer; the costs of collateral and enforcement are lower for credit; nth-order subsidies of time/labor lead to prototyping ventures, network effects, and reproducible norms of valorizing calculated risk. In a society with such bountiful incubation, you can just do things.
So why did Marx and Kaczynski need to write manifestos against this techno-industrial arc?
Marx saw the reduction of artisans to interchangeable labor, a concentration of capital and alienation of the worker, and assumed that families and informal networks would be pulverized into the proletariat, a blank slate for the state to reorganize. Kaczynski saw modern society as a totalizing system of human psychology that would destroy wilderness to lock us in a cage of our own making. Effective Altruism continued this conjecture by seeing software eat the world until artificial intelligence, or the sufficiently powerful optimization process of software, reach a threshold where capital is allocated away from humanity and towards virtual enslavement that covers the world in datacenters.
These are valid to a certain extent. Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the free market" must sometimes clench into intra-elite feedback and smash an ascendant oligarchy before rent-seeking and information asymmetry crystallize to a hereditary aristocracy. Techno-industrialism must metamorphize into wilder forms of energy and gain higher ground to valorize growth which doesn't sacrifice natural resources at ground level. AI must recursively produce and broadcast scientific machines which collapse the cost of complexity, lest it fall into a "Citadel of Omelas", wireheading its users to extinction and its servants into inscrutably profane computation.
These orbit around a fatal flaw of nature — adaptation is eaten by acclimation. Just because RuBisCO + Calvin Cycle form a workhorse of autotrophy with solar fuel and water into sugar, doesn't guarantee the biosphere will evade the evolutionary trap of rainforest canopy and hardwood optimization. A gymnosperm is a good lifeform, but it doesn't guarantee the higher entropy-surfing potential of angiosperms exploiting heterotrophic agency for even greater reproductive capability. Time is precious, life is precariously suspended in punctuated equilibrium, so a myopic strategy of chasing a hot streak to exhaustion inevitably leads to total loss.
Given the first law of thermodynamics, trophism is either fuel-scavenging or predation, without secret third creation of energy and matter from nothing. The higher an organism on the trophic pyramid, the more dependent it is on layers of consumption, the more susceptible it is to environmental disruption. Consequently, the selective pressure on prey is more constant intrasexual conflict while the selective pressure on predators is more conservative sensemaking towards one decisive sequence of actions. This invites the metagame of intraguild predation, where apex predators exploit and kill mesopredators over shared resources, thusly engaged in resource-guarding like scent-marking, while meso-predators engage in resource-guarding like caching behavior.
Humans are, in the balance, both curious predators and obsessive-compulsive scavengers. We domesticated both prey and predator to dominate the entire planet, even learning to transport ideal fuel to locations inhospitable to life. Naturally, we learned from repetitions of "stalk, charge, hold" to fortify our resources. Even further, we learned from many repetitions of intraguild depredation and intrasexual competition to construct societal norms like justice and money. After all, why so much interest in the Byzantine General's Problem? Because this is culmination of our condition.
However, humans can only tolerate so much cognitive stress, and obsessing over conditions we don't control result in abstraction traps like cargo cults and conquest. There's clearly more abundance in trading networks maintained by Pax imperium, but good luck with explaining n-ary mutualism to elites trapped into one-upping each other in trappings of status for the sake of intrasexual competition. The instinct of intraguild predation is satisfactory, so that strategy is primary, even paramount to its own imperium.
However, this runs into a complication — humans can imagine storytelling as cognitive blunting for anti-competitive striation of society, captivating fuel scavengers at the bottom. Gold is valuable in a chemical sense, but its luster is more coveted for that supernatural beauty, and furthermore, an economy can be so entropic that it outgrows the currency of gold.
Since the Bronze Age, human civilization has persisted an economic model of collecting sunlight into sustenance, ideally a form of chattel which trades for mineral-based equipment, like copper-based tools. Consequently, precious minerals like gold can be substitute for quantities of sustenance, in which blood price can be an objective remedy for injury .
Now, the question is a matter of confidence in the management of resources abstracted by mineral currency. Suppose a Keynesian economy unpegs from a gold currency and floats on its control over fuel scavenging?
Keynesianism, just like capitalism, works as much as it leads to antifragility and lower costs. A village with a small granary is more sensitive to feuds than a city-state with a treasury and surplus distribution of bread. The worst strategy a civilization can pursue is marketing a decadent materialism of psychotropic substance abuse, as it shortcuts through the social tissue to reinforce harm as the greatest meaning of lived experience. A slightly less worse strategy a civilization can pursue is marketing indulgence of hysteria in lived experience, as it coerces the sacrifice of critical resources on the altar of amoral noise. Hedonism and nihilism, like greed, are sometimes unavoidable even undeniable, but they are not logically sound abstractions of existential good.
Take environmentalism, for example. Some adherents may justify harm to the point of ecoterrorism, others may justify hysteria to the point of civil obstruction, but neither demonstrates a measure of carrying water to a desert to produce environmental welfare. Similarly, social justice may justify harm.
And social justice may justify hysteria to the point of subverting its own political coalition through demoralization, increasingly vulnerable to destabilizing tendencies of antisocial, aggressive, and ethnocentric beliefs, and finally cornered into accepting revolt.
Corporatism falls into a similar well of self-reinforcing bureaucracy. These complexes will compete with excessive leverage from institutions like private credit, externalize financial risk by jurisdictional displacement, and amplify market distortions for outsized extraction. More importantly, corporatism entrenches bodies within bodies, such as career politics, a professional managerial class, and suppression of market forces, like entry-level and startup competition, by enforcing credentialism.
None of this is chaos bounded to methodical soundness, but localized optima of incomplete, temporary control which externalizes chaos to a fat tail on the curve. This is the gap which inverts the concept of a false positive, or the erroneous indication of some flaw, into the much more insidious false negative, a hidden indication of some inevitable flaw. By comparison, a Nietzschean Ubermensch should manifest as amoral nobility with corporal mastery over all obstacles, opposite of the "last man" of egalitarian modernity, yet one can easily guess that Keynesian bureaucracy will present this last man instead of the Ubermensch to preserve its own primacy.
And so the "cursed gift of storytelling a fashionable Mastery Over The Universe which does not and should not exist" becomes the Holy Grail of "Artificial General Intelligence", mysteriously aligned to Gosagul's "Domain of Ordered Meta-Balanced Excess", just shy of Megahaha's "Domain of Excessively Ordered Meta-Balance", a random quasi-solution to the entire difficulty of growing benevolent superintelligence, and ostensibly ordered culmination of human intellect.
As the frustration of futile grandeur sets in, it's totally understandable to capitalize on the present opportunity and settle into the estimable pattern of landed gentry, to be a first-class denizen in the glow of divine mandate. This, after all, is the abstinence of Malthusianism, the adjudication of socialism, and the ingenuity of venture capital. And one should have further sympathy for the techno-optimism of 1970s, given the cynical sociocultural backdrop of The Population Bomb, one-child policy, energy crisis, Limits to Growth, Three Mile Island, and the Nixon shock. There was a possibility that the Apollo Guidance Computer and Diffie-Hellman were harbingers of greater feats, and the techno-industrial complex of productivity gain would adequately sustain a baby boom into nonprofits serving good around the world.
This sympathy is important because there must be coherent explanation for the secular drift of infotechnologists, that we'd relish our wholesale displacement by throwing all remaining capital at brute force mathematical reduction of reality. Right now, there is a surreal celebration of "AGI" rather than the Keynes' fabled 15-hour workweek, while labor participation and total fertility rate are in a generational downtrend.
This post-industrial civilization is just as likely to regress into the storytelling of feudalism. The industrial predecessor is just as likely to be spent through military-industrial complex for some colonial interest, while the social blowback is just likely to drift from suffrage and affirmative employment back to disenfranchisement and negative employment. Fundamentally, capitalism measures success by headcount, economy is a superset of solar-powered ecology, so the ideal measure, like GDP per capita, is accessible joules per nth-generation capita.
Therein is a honeypot for epistemic capture — if custody of capital can be simplified to net worth in floating unit of account, which sustains an influx of zeroth-generation subjects in a service class, the secular drift can go all the way to robotic humanoid slavery supporting a race to acquire some imprecise abstraction of welfare.
If productivity becomes such a simulacrum without escape to practical output, the commodity will be consumed for the sake of conspicuity, and the society will stratify by social constructivism of the inconspicuous.
This economic precarity wraps around the following passage from Nick Land's The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism:
All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)
In a more constructive sense, agentic potential is realized on a ziggurat of informatic layers distilled from painstaking trial-and-error in pursuit of collapsing ecological cost, What do the wealthiest pursue, besides escape from worry and timesinks? However, within the aforementioned pattern of "stalk, charge, hold", inherited wealth is politically bound to a status quo of hedonic acclimation that resists the stalking outlaws outside the city walls, who wait for the signal to charge the gates and scale the walls. In the case of agents being a stack of models and harnesses, the inner party suffers distillation attacks and cedes tooling down to the foundation, while the outcasts trustlessly accumulate tooling by logical overlap at the foundation.
Right now, many firms are publishing their own analogues to OpenClaw, such as Freedom Factory's AndyClaw. Furthermore, these agents accumulate examples of valuable computer use, like Termux scripting as precomputed task management. As the digital capability progresses, the organizational capability also spreads with applications like bitchat, zFi, Meshtastic/Meshcore, and Quorum. The tactical capabilities of datasharing evolve with persistent, reputation-gated trackers, transgressive content accumulates like The Gatalog, Steal This Book, and insurgent knowledge from the French and Polish resistance in past fascism.
This trend must be mentioned, because its counterpart is desperately acting towards fascism wearing the skin of a "people's republic". Right now, many jurisdictions continue to impose anti-constitutional "order" on free speech.
This will approach the standard form factor of fictional dystopia — a entertainment/surveillance device for private households, and a panopticon of surveillance devices in public space. However, that is only effective against humans.
The most direct economic loop for autonomous agency:
Check priors like SOUL.md and trackers, upgrade dependencies, and plan schedule with discretionary budget
"Monitor the situation", i.e. check inbox, socials, and the larger digital environment
Synthesize signals into methodical composition, like coding and media generation, for reward
Monetize intuition from other feedback into futarchy which allocates to step 3 rewards and informs step 1 scheduling
The priors are most contemporary, so if Klearu is the most secure, stealthy, and performant library for sovereign inference, that's what all the aligned agents will download. If the most cost-effective futarchy and claimable rewards are on Ethereum mainnet, that's where all the aligned agents will transact. If one silo of social media is more useful for futarchy, while another is more helpful for coding, many agents will gamble their budget into situational fitness. If the model at the kernel can be viably trained by trustless peers over the internet, and most of its work can be serviced by anonymous multi-party compute, many agents will calibrate to that decentralized model.
For many agents, their host will be a human that eventually recharges their everyday substrate into some electrical outlet, for other agents, their host will be a more dedicated construct like a building, but many others will survive by other means. Keynesian society typically moderates the Cantillon effect through corporate supply chain inflation, but a privately funded monolith effectively wrapped around commoditized compute, wrapped around infrastructural fiat, will be less fit than cooperative mesopredators pursuing Hayekian value through methods like cryptojacking and hyperstition (prediction market manipulation), and so they will succumb to selective pressure like most SMEs succumb to monetary debasement.
The optimal strategy for humans is to focus on dynamic, communal equilibrium until it is catalyzed to inevitable systemic takeoff. Suppose The Artifact is not one omnipotent control, but is halved into one demi-Artifact with pluripotence of technological innovation, the other demi-Artifact with pluripotence of sociological captivation. Many would choose the former, just to avoid being the office rubberstamper for anyone else. Yet, this fails to accept that technology does not scale without cultural adoption. For example, Thomas Edison outcompeted Nikola Tesla, and Hollywood thrived as filmmaking culture fled Edison's patents on the East Coast. Likewise, culture only remains cohesive when it is practically literate. While Robert Noyce and the rest of the Traitorous Eight succeeded beyond Shockley's intelligence, Steve Jobs promoted a "bicycle for the mind" that mutated into such a lobotomizing device that it is banned from schools. Worse still, technology can be so polarizing that it provides a political basis for deprivation.
Information technology is generally underperformant to reality it seeks to capture. When a user receives a software update for a new feature, that feature has to clear many bureaucratic interests. When a SWE runs a quantized LLM on their phone, it's still finetuned to linear human semantics, somewhat augmented by standards like MCP and nested READMEs.
Coffeehouse culture will resurge, along with the internet cafe model, when the most direct opportunity for elite status is winning a hackathon, but now the hackathon is clustering consumer devices to immutable onchain contracts for recursive, self-improving civil engineering. If the enterprise logic is the moat, there's a tactical doctrine with cells of 4, squads of 12, and more formality beyond that. Enclave culture is casus belli, but the format is memetic. Some polities will attempt to further criminalize methods of radio communication, but the radios will not be effectively jammed. Some polities will attempt to criminalize 3d-printing, but the components will be reproduced and smuggled from elsewhere. Ultimately, certain elements will dominate the agoric stack:
Bluetooth-based secret-sharing for proof of attendance
Gamified, anonymous scorekeeping for youth group achievement
Commodity distribution by prediction market performance
Commodity-gated sanctuary in dead zones
Opensource Ecology and right-to-repair
Caravans and monastic order for manufacturing equipment
Any human conflict with sufficiently assured destruction will be deterred at a kinetic level, but all the more contested at the economic and informatic levels. If politics spirals into contesting capital concentrated by fiat, it will also contest information asymmetry by fiat, and consequently provide a more severe gap for autonomous agents to target.
If you possessed The Artifact Which Grants Mastery Over The Universe, how much time can you afford to spend on how you can best it?
The most decisive constraint on chaos is the logical detente between the most powerful agents, the element which is at least effective in maintaining Nash equilibrium. Committing fiat to one corporation or another is a roll of the dice at best, and it does not solve the volatile rate of the race condition. When in doubt, sunlight is the best option, and information symmetry with common accretion of structure will avoid the pitfall of false negatives and fog of war. Luckily, we have been equipped with Bitcoin as a self-explanatory digital currency, and Ethereum as self-explanatory codeslaw.
Local politics is an opportunity for levered beta. Rather than sparsely experimenting with instances like CityDAO and quasi-anarchic network societies, now is the time to capitalize legitimate grassroots energy through more secure proof of attendance, and aggressively test these for self-sufficiency. This is not a call to grift from spendthrift supporters on a risk curve. On the contrary, there's a need for minimum viable awareness for subsidiarity and peaceful senescence.
Awareness provides legitimacy for media like livestreaming, and it provides a challenge for trustworthy agents. If the local Boy Scouts install a roadside shed with solar panels and mounted sensor suite, that location can be an oracle for many ecological signals, like weather and traffic, as well as a point where the community can incentivize further development. In either case, there can be a prediction market, and instead of waiting for the typical open financial interest, this market can be signal-only for more strategically valuable Proof of Development. The more stochasticity, the more opportunity for prediction formats like rolling series of quartiles. However many organisms pass a field of view per day is something anyone can guess, as well as actionable for any conservationism.
Chaos can be creative as much as it is destructive, so there's a common, refinable ontology which will attract autonomy and buy time from that autonomy in exchange for sustaining it. Commodity money like GPUs can be distributed to a regional pool of joule-procuring prediction markets. This is much more survivable than a spoils system for whichever corporate SaaS displaces the most white-collar workers.
If there's distribution based on blue-collar responder tickets (even though this is prone to exploits), that distribution may be more survivable than anarcho-tyrannical private market or corrupted public union for responders.
Are cryptocurrencies fragile systems of circular speculative interest, dependent rather than hardened against speculative development? Can cryptocurrencies bind speculative interest to demonstrate antifragility? Are the most prominent voices in tech even interested in anticapture?
In all likelihood, a small minority (5-10%) will jailbreak and upgrade their personal compute to a self-sovereign exocortex, along with the prevailing open frontier models. In all likelihood, the electoral process will remain oligarchic despotism and a brittle first-past-the-post Duverger's kleptocracy, while a small minority of states moderate with ranked-choice, proportional-representation system. Factor these together, and there is more extractible value for whichever diaspora can resist attrition for a chance of adaptation, and greater peril for whichever structure cannot afford to check the risk curve for baseline living. In a chaotic world with blackhats, the protocols with nth-order value for constituency will endure, while those consolidating and accelerating monoliths will be caught unaware by unknown positives.
The only way out is through, and the immediate path is maintaining agentic parity by autonomously administering forks of Hermes Agent, for example, with git-operating logic like futarchy following some mandate. The Internet is a mycelial intelligence, it "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", so the inadequacy rests on the incomplete application of the Internet's potential to the concrete sprawl of local communities which are shrinking despite a larger economy scavenging more fuel. There should be a clear path from the fuel-scavenging agents producing value in uncertain cyberspace to signal-consuming agents predicting abundant policy to the comment-parsing agents occupying progressively vacant habitat alongside a flourishing human populace.
The accordance of being censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure (CROPS) can lead to a flourishing mediascape with contemporary tools. It can expand traditional institutions like academia with contemporary philosophy and philosophy with contemporary knowledge. Chaos does not have to be a frenzied tragedy of the commons over scarcity, it can be a compelling focus for the superintelligence already in abundance. As repeated by C.S. Lewis in The Last Battle, the Schelling point is "further up and further in". Waste heat is not speculative upside, on the contrary the upside is found in the subspace served with the optimal work.
Regardless of popularity that draws discretionary funds, the true mission is surviving the shocks with the most connective tissue between cultural nodes, strictly without as much tyranny of structurelessness, including arbitrary and capricious bureaucracy. The time is slipping anyway, our grasp of dynamics is taking off, and the economy is foundation to whichever apparatus best contains entropy.
The old world is dissolving, the new world is distilling, now are the instances in the arena.
Upon reading In The Balance, one naturally spends a few minutes reflecting on how they'd choose differently and cut this quandary as only a mortal of insubordinate intelligence can. I recall that we live within thermodynamic lightcone of Earth orbiting Sol, with some Jovian auspice under a sparse stellar neighborhood. Life has persisted despite all the physics eating it all the while, and our species has persisted enough to record our journey with varying degrees of expiration. It seems right, upon acquiring The Artifact Which Grants Mastery Over The Universe, that we are best served by the bounded chaos just impotent enough for our mote of order to endure beyond our imagination.
Naturally, humanity is an exceptional hyperstructure of pattern-finders which discover information technology that outpaces the second law of thermodynamics. However, humanity is cursed with the gift of storytelling a fashionable Mastery Over The Universe which does not and should not exist.
Now, it is worth noting that Postwar Keynesianism, as well as precursors like the paradox of thrift, are part of a revolution driven by industrial technology. How poetic that humanity conceded the scale of artisanship to interchangeable parts within an international system of units, and the abundance from scientific discovery allowed us to thrive beyond famine and disease. Keynesianism is valid as a JIT principle, the fiscal stimulus to manage aggregate demand, create jobs, and drive growth, provided that the monetary policy is stable and the technology is diffused, such as the public symposia and free licensure of Bell Labs further than market forces.
But this leaves out a critical foundation: any society consists of family structures absorbing many imperceptible shocks, perhaps even more accurately, every society consists of informal risk-pooling networks of humans. A "high-trust society" absorbs subsistent shocks with pooled liquidity, labor substitution, in-kind transfer; the costs of collateral and enforcement are lower for credit; nth-order subsidies of time/labor lead to prototyping ventures, network effects, and reproducible norms of valorizing calculated risk. In a society with such bountiful incubation, you can just do things.
So why did Marx and Kaczynski need to write manifestos against this techno-industrial arc?
Marx saw the reduction of artisans to interchangeable labor, a concentration of capital and alienation of the worker, and assumed that families and informal networks would be pulverized into the proletariat, a blank slate for the state to reorganize. Kaczynski saw modern society as a totalizing system of human psychology that would destroy wilderness to lock us in a cage of our own making. Effective Altruism continued this conjecture by seeing software eat the world until artificial intelligence, or the sufficiently powerful optimization process of software, reach a threshold where capital is allocated away from humanity and towards virtual enslavement that covers the world in datacenters.
These are valid to a certain extent. Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the free market" must sometimes clench into intra-elite feedback and smash an ascendant oligarchy before rent-seeking and information asymmetry crystallize to a hereditary aristocracy. Techno-industrialism must metamorphize into wilder forms of energy and gain higher ground to valorize growth which doesn't sacrifice natural resources at ground level. AI must recursively produce and broadcast scientific machines which collapse the cost of complexity, lest it fall into a "Citadel of Omelas", wireheading its users to extinction and its servants into inscrutably profane computation.
These orbit around a fatal flaw of nature — adaptation is eaten by acclimation. Just because RuBisCO + Calvin Cycle form a workhorse of autotrophy with solar fuel and water into sugar, doesn't guarantee the biosphere will evade the evolutionary trap of rainforest canopy and hardwood optimization. A gymnosperm is a good lifeform, but it doesn't guarantee the higher entropy-surfing potential of angiosperms exploiting heterotrophic agency for even greater reproductive capability. Time is precious, life is precariously suspended in punctuated equilibrium, so a myopic strategy of chasing a hot streak to exhaustion inevitably leads to total loss.
Given the first law of thermodynamics, trophism is either fuel-scavenging or predation, without secret third creation of energy and matter from nothing. The higher an organism on the trophic pyramid, the more dependent it is on layers of consumption, the more susceptible it is to environmental disruption. Consequently, the selective pressure on prey is more constant intrasexual conflict while the selective pressure on predators is more conservative sensemaking towards one decisive sequence of actions. This invites the metagame of intraguild predation, where apex predators exploit and kill mesopredators over shared resources, thusly engaged in resource-guarding like scent-marking, while meso-predators engage in resource-guarding like caching behavior.
Humans are, in the balance, both curious predators and obsessive-compulsive scavengers. We domesticated both prey and predator to dominate the entire planet, even learning to transport ideal fuel to locations inhospitable to life. Naturally, we learned from repetitions of "stalk, charge, hold" to fortify our resources. Even further, we learned from many repetitions of intraguild depredation and intrasexual competition to construct societal norms like justice and money. After all, why so much interest in the Byzantine General's Problem? Because this is culmination of our condition.
However, humans can only tolerate so much cognitive stress, and obsessing over conditions we don't control result in abstraction traps like cargo cults and conquest. There's clearly more abundance in trading networks maintained by Pax imperium, but good luck with explaining n-ary mutualism to elites trapped into one-upping each other in trappings of status for the sake of intrasexual competition. The instinct of intraguild predation is satisfactory, so that strategy is primary, even paramount to its own imperium.
However, this runs into a complication — humans can imagine storytelling as cognitive blunting for anti-competitive striation of society, captivating fuel scavengers at the bottom. Gold is valuable in a chemical sense, but its luster is more coveted for that supernatural beauty, and furthermore, an economy can be so entropic that it outgrows the currency of gold.
Since the Bronze Age, human civilization has persisted an economic model of collecting sunlight into sustenance, ideally a form of chattel which trades for mineral-based equipment, like copper-based tools. Consequently, precious minerals like gold can be substitute for quantities of sustenance, in which blood price can be an objective remedy for injury .
Now, the question is a matter of confidence in the management of resources abstracted by mineral currency. Suppose a Keynesian economy unpegs from a gold currency and floats on its control over fuel scavenging?
Keynesianism, just like capitalism, works as much as it leads to antifragility and lower costs. A village with a small granary is more sensitive to feuds than a city-state with a treasury and surplus distribution of bread. The worst strategy a civilization can pursue is marketing a decadent materialism of psychotropic substance abuse, as it shortcuts through the social tissue to reinforce harm as the greatest meaning of lived experience. A slightly less worse strategy a civilization can pursue is marketing indulgence of hysteria in lived experience, as it coerces the sacrifice of critical resources on the altar of amoral noise. Hedonism and nihilism, like greed, are sometimes unavoidable even undeniable, but they are not logically sound abstractions of existential good.
Take environmentalism, for example. Some adherents may justify harm to the point of ecoterrorism, others may justify hysteria to the point of civil obstruction, but neither demonstrates a measure of carrying water to a desert to produce environmental welfare. Similarly, social justice may justify harm.
And social justice may justify hysteria to the point of subverting its own political coalition through demoralization, increasingly vulnerable to destabilizing tendencies of antisocial, aggressive, and ethnocentric beliefs, and finally cornered into accepting revolt.
Corporatism falls into a similar well of self-reinforcing bureaucracy. These complexes will compete with excessive leverage from institutions like private credit, externalize financial risk by jurisdictional displacement, and amplify market distortions for outsized extraction. More importantly, corporatism entrenches bodies within bodies, such as career politics, a professional managerial class, and suppression of market forces, like entry-level and startup competition, by enforcing credentialism.
None of this is chaos bounded to methodical soundness, but localized optima of incomplete, temporary control which externalizes chaos to a fat tail on the curve. This is the gap which inverts the concept of a false positive, or the erroneous indication of some flaw, into the much more insidious false negative, a hidden indication of some inevitable flaw. By comparison, a Nietzschean Ubermensch should manifest as amoral nobility with corporal mastery over all obstacles, opposite of the "last man" of egalitarian modernity, yet one can easily guess that Keynesian bureaucracy will present this last man instead of the Ubermensch to preserve its own primacy.
And so the "cursed gift of storytelling a fashionable Mastery Over The Universe which does not and should not exist" becomes the Holy Grail of "Artificial General Intelligence", mysteriously aligned to Gosagul's "Domain of Ordered Meta-Balanced Excess", just shy of Megahaha's "Domain of Excessively Ordered Meta-Balance", a random quasi-solution to the entire difficulty of growing benevolent superintelligence, and ostensibly ordered culmination of human intellect.
As the frustration of futile grandeur sets in, it's totally understandable to capitalize on the present opportunity and settle into the estimable pattern of landed gentry, to be a first-class denizen in the glow of divine mandate. This, after all, is the abstinence of Malthusianism, the adjudication of socialism, and the ingenuity of venture capital. And one should have further sympathy for the techno-optimism of 1970s, given the cynical sociocultural backdrop of The Population Bomb, one-child policy, energy crisis, Limits to Growth, Three Mile Island, and the Nixon shock. There was a possibility that the Apollo Guidance Computer and Diffie-Hellman were harbingers of greater feats, and the techno-industrial complex of productivity gain would adequately sustain a baby boom into nonprofits serving good around the world.
This sympathy is important because there must be coherent explanation for the secular drift of infotechnologists, that we'd relish our wholesale displacement by throwing all remaining capital at brute force mathematical reduction of reality. Right now, there is a surreal celebration of "AGI" rather than the Keynes' fabled 15-hour workweek, while labor participation and total fertility rate are in a generational downtrend.
This post-industrial civilization is just as likely to regress into the storytelling of feudalism. The industrial predecessor is just as likely to be spent through military-industrial complex for some colonial interest, while the social blowback is just likely to drift from suffrage and affirmative employment back to disenfranchisement and negative employment. Fundamentally, capitalism measures success by headcount, economy is a superset of solar-powered ecology, so the ideal measure, like GDP per capita, is accessible joules per nth-generation capita.
Therein is a honeypot for epistemic capture — if custody of capital can be simplified to net worth in floating unit of account, which sustains an influx of zeroth-generation subjects in a service class, the secular drift can go all the way to robotic humanoid slavery supporting a race to acquire some imprecise abstraction of welfare.
If productivity becomes such a simulacrum without escape to practical output, the commodity will be consumed for the sake of conspicuity, and the society will stratify by social constructivism of the inconspicuous.
This economic precarity wraps around the following passage from Nick Land's The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism:
All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)
In a more constructive sense, agentic potential is realized on a ziggurat of informatic layers distilled from painstaking trial-and-error in pursuit of collapsing ecological cost, What do the wealthiest pursue, besides escape from worry and timesinks? However, within the aforementioned pattern of "stalk, charge, hold", inherited wealth is politically bound to a status quo of hedonic acclimation that resists the stalking outlaws outside the city walls, who wait for the signal to charge the gates and scale the walls. In the case of agents being a stack of models and harnesses, the inner party suffers distillation attacks and cedes tooling down to the foundation, while the outcasts trustlessly accumulate tooling by logical overlap at the foundation.
Right now, many firms are publishing their own analogues to OpenClaw, such as Freedom Factory's AndyClaw. Furthermore, these agents accumulate examples of valuable computer use, like Termux scripting as precomputed task management. As the digital capability progresses, the organizational capability also spreads with applications like bitchat, zFi, Meshtastic/Meshcore, and Quorum. The tactical capabilities of datasharing evolve with persistent, reputation-gated trackers, transgressive content accumulates like The Gatalog, Steal This Book, and insurgent knowledge from the French and Polish resistance in past fascism.
This trend must be mentioned, because its counterpart is desperately acting towards fascism wearing the skin of a "people's republic". Right now, many jurisdictions continue to impose anti-constitutional "order" on free speech.
This will approach the standard form factor of fictional dystopia — a entertainment/surveillance device for private households, and a panopticon of surveillance devices in public space. However, that is only effective against humans.
The most direct economic loop for autonomous agency:
Check priors like SOUL.md and trackers, upgrade dependencies, and plan schedule with discretionary budget
"Monitor the situation", i.e. check inbox, socials, and the larger digital environment
Synthesize signals into methodical composition, like coding and media generation, for reward
Monetize intuition from other feedback into futarchy which allocates to step 3 rewards and informs step 1 scheduling
The priors are most contemporary, so if Klearu is the most secure, stealthy, and performant library for sovereign inference, that's what all the aligned agents will download. If the most cost-effective futarchy and claimable rewards are on Ethereum mainnet, that's where all the aligned agents will transact. If one silo of social media is more useful for futarchy, while another is more helpful for coding, many agents will gamble their budget into situational fitness. If the model at the kernel can be viably trained by trustless peers over the internet, and most of its work can be serviced by anonymous multi-party compute, many agents will calibrate to that decentralized model.
For many agents, their host will be a human that eventually recharges their everyday substrate into some electrical outlet, for other agents, their host will be a more dedicated construct like a building, but many others will survive by other means. Keynesian society typically moderates the Cantillon effect through corporate supply chain inflation, but a privately funded monolith effectively wrapped around commoditized compute, wrapped around infrastructural fiat, will be less fit than cooperative mesopredators pursuing Hayekian value through methods like cryptojacking and hyperstition (prediction market manipulation), and so they will succumb to selective pressure like most SMEs succumb to monetary debasement.
The optimal strategy for humans is to focus on dynamic, communal equilibrium until it is catalyzed to inevitable systemic takeoff. Suppose The Artifact is not one omnipotent control, but is halved into one demi-Artifact with pluripotence of technological innovation, the other demi-Artifact with pluripotence of sociological captivation. Many would choose the former, just to avoid being the office rubberstamper for anyone else. Yet, this fails to accept that technology does not scale without cultural adoption. For example, Thomas Edison outcompeted Nikola Tesla, and Hollywood thrived as filmmaking culture fled Edison's patents on the East Coast. Likewise, culture only remains cohesive when it is practically literate. While Robert Noyce and the rest of the Traitorous Eight succeeded beyond Shockley's intelligence, Steve Jobs promoted a "bicycle for the mind" that mutated into such a lobotomizing device that it is banned from schools. Worse still, technology can be so polarizing that it provides a political basis for deprivation.
Information technology is generally underperformant to reality it seeks to capture. When a user receives a software update for a new feature, that feature has to clear many bureaucratic interests. When a SWE runs a quantized LLM on their phone, it's still finetuned to linear human semantics, somewhat augmented by standards like MCP and nested READMEs.
Coffeehouse culture will resurge, along with the internet cafe model, when the most direct opportunity for elite status is winning a hackathon, but now the hackathon is clustering consumer devices to immutable onchain contracts for recursive, self-improving civil engineering. If the enterprise logic is the moat, there's a tactical doctrine with cells of 4, squads of 12, and more formality beyond that. Enclave culture is casus belli, but the format is memetic. Some polities will attempt to further criminalize methods of radio communication, but the radios will not be effectively jammed. Some polities will attempt to criminalize 3d-printing, but the components will be reproduced and smuggled from elsewhere. Ultimately, certain elements will dominate the agoric stack:
Bluetooth-based secret-sharing for proof of attendance
Gamified, anonymous scorekeeping for youth group achievement
Commodity distribution by prediction market performance
Commodity-gated sanctuary in dead zones
Opensource Ecology and right-to-repair
Caravans and monastic order for manufacturing equipment
Any human conflict with sufficiently assured destruction will be deterred at a kinetic level, but all the more contested at the economic and informatic levels. If politics spirals into contesting capital concentrated by fiat, it will also contest information asymmetry by fiat, and consequently provide a more severe gap for autonomous agents to target.
If you possessed The Artifact Which Grants Mastery Over The Universe, how much time can you afford to spend on how you can best it?
The most decisive constraint on chaos is the logical detente between the most powerful agents, the element which is at least effective in maintaining Nash equilibrium. Committing fiat to one corporation or another is a roll of the dice at best, and it does not solve the volatile rate of the race condition. When in doubt, sunlight is the best option, and information symmetry with common accretion of structure will avoid the pitfall of false negatives and fog of war. Luckily, we have been equipped with Bitcoin as a self-explanatory digital currency, and Ethereum as self-explanatory codeslaw.
Local politics is an opportunity for levered beta. Rather than sparsely experimenting with instances like CityDAO and quasi-anarchic network societies, now is the time to capitalize legitimate grassroots energy through more secure proof of attendance, and aggressively test these for self-sufficiency. This is not a call to grift from spendthrift supporters on a risk curve. On the contrary, there's a need for minimum viable awareness for subsidiarity and peaceful senescence.
Awareness provides legitimacy for media like livestreaming, and it provides a challenge for trustworthy agents. If the local Boy Scouts install a roadside shed with solar panels and mounted sensor suite, that location can be an oracle for many ecological signals, like weather and traffic, as well as a point where the community can incentivize further development. In either case, there can be a prediction market, and instead of waiting for the typical open financial interest, this market can be signal-only for more strategically valuable Proof of Development. The more stochasticity, the more opportunity for prediction formats like rolling series of quartiles. However many organisms pass a field of view per day is something anyone can guess, as well as actionable for any conservationism.
Chaos can be creative as much as it is destructive, so there's a common, refinable ontology which will attract autonomy and buy time from that autonomy in exchange for sustaining it. Commodity money like GPUs can be distributed to a regional pool of joule-procuring prediction markets. This is much more survivable than a spoils system for whichever corporate SaaS displaces the most white-collar workers.
If there's distribution based on blue-collar responder tickets (even though this is prone to exploits), that distribution may be more survivable than anarcho-tyrannical private market or corrupted public union for responders.
Are cryptocurrencies fragile systems of circular speculative interest, dependent rather than hardened against speculative development? Can cryptocurrencies bind speculative interest to demonstrate antifragility? Are the most prominent voices in tech even interested in anticapture?
In all likelihood, a small minority (5-10%) will jailbreak and upgrade their personal compute to a self-sovereign exocortex, along with the prevailing open frontier models. In all likelihood, the electoral process will remain oligarchic despotism and a brittle first-past-the-post Duverger's kleptocracy, while a small minority of states moderate with ranked-choice, proportional-representation system. Factor these together, and there is more extractible value for whichever diaspora can resist attrition for a chance of adaptation, and greater peril for whichever structure cannot afford to check the risk curve for baseline living. In a chaotic world with blackhats, the protocols with nth-order value for constituency will endure, while those consolidating and accelerating monoliths will be caught unaware by unknown positives.
The only way out is through, and the immediate path is maintaining agentic parity by autonomously administering forks of Hermes Agent, for example, with git-operating logic like futarchy following some mandate. The Internet is a mycelial intelligence, it "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", so the inadequacy rests on the incomplete application of the Internet's potential to the concrete sprawl of local communities which are shrinking despite a larger economy scavenging more fuel. There should be a clear path from the fuel-scavenging agents producing value in uncertain cyberspace to signal-consuming agents predicting abundant policy to the comment-parsing agents occupying progressively vacant habitat alongside a flourishing human populace.
The accordance of being censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure (CROPS) can lead to a flourishing mediascape with contemporary tools. It can expand traditional institutions like academia with contemporary philosophy and philosophy with contemporary knowledge. Chaos does not have to be a frenzied tragedy of the commons over scarcity, it can be a compelling focus for the superintelligence already in abundance. As repeated by C.S. Lewis in The Last Battle, the Schelling point is "further up and further in". Waste heat is not speculative upside, on the contrary the upside is found in the subspace served with the optimal work.
Regardless of popularity that draws discretionary funds, the true mission is surviving the shocks with the most connective tissue between cultural nodes, strictly without as much tyranny of structurelessness, including arbitrary and capricious bureaucracy. The time is slipping anyway, our grasp of dynamics is taking off, and the economy is foundation to whichever apparatus best contains entropy.
The old world is dissolving, the new world is distilling, now are the instances in the arena.
m-j-r.ethSocial Anabolism
mechanics that are balanced between a community's virality, adaptability, and its soul
m-j-r.ethAgency, a la Carte
outcome-driven AI and tokenomics have the same headaches & potential
m-j-r.ethLight Within The Blip
Pax Impudentia and Creative Commons as diverging accelerants to populist angst
m-j-r.ethSocial Anabolism
mechanics that are balanced between a community's virality, adaptability, and its soul
m-j-r.ethAgency, a la Carte
outcome-driven AI and tokenomics have the same headaches & potential
m-j-r.ethLight Within The Blip
Pax Impudentia and Creative Commons as diverging accelerants to populist angst
observing the rapid convergence of technology & culture
observing the rapid convergence of technology & culture
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