TL;DR - Given the cultural, historical, and current economic constraints, our ecosystem should be hardened against catastrophic collapse & takeover. Even anons have a responsibility to be forthcoming about decision-making, capital management, and asymmetric power dynamics (including tribal superiority and backchannelled speech). Speech & risk exposure should be self-sovereign and self-contained. All attempts to deprive others of the full breadth of public knowledge should be called out. Our technology stacks are still susceptible to security and counterparty risks, and until fully implemented, we need to demand as an entire community that there is no agreement or volunteered capital without all parties acknowledging a basis of property and human rights. There should be no allowances for known bad actors or completely unknown sybil actors. We’re still early, and it’s not too late (explained below).

The lifespan of the oldest constitution still in effect (drafted 8 October 1600) covers roughly 8% of known historical records. The Magna Carta, touted as the seminal document for distribution of power away from a mandate of heaven, only drafted on 15 June 1215, covers 16% of known historical records.

Governments, like human rights, are impermanent and subject to cultural shifts. There is a valid criticism that modern society has introduced enough stability to also invite further dissonance without failure. This speaks to the general definition of evolution, that with enough diversity and selective pressure, a population will always change in response until it reaches a dynamic equilibrium. The same goes for innovation in tech, specifically that we undertake trial-and-error enterprises that effectively iterate upon failure until they introduce a massive economic growth factor.

However, we do have a problem, and it comes from our nature as social animals. Unfortunately, while humans have demonstrated enough sentience to develop agrarianism, written language, and mental frameworks like philosophy and the scientific method, we have constantly struggled to keep the same pace with resource management and state policy. Ultimately, the “state” of capital in any snapshot moment is a product largely influenced by our sociology. For example, even though most governments have reached the stage of nuanced democracy, a majority of the voting systems are first-past-the-post and procured by collusion-prone institutions. More specifically, the United States has been anchored by an irreversibly gerrymandered, two-party representative democracy that repeatedly undergoes the process of disenfranchisement from its voting system. Many other countries have gone through a combination of popular uprisings and military caste control.

On the other hand, we should consider that despite these fallen angels on our shoulders, humanity has progressively innovated and arbitrated resource distribution in a way that has nearly superseded the punctuated equilibrium that nature intends. Simply put, we have taken care of our own to some degree that other animal populations cannot afford in their environment. Not only do humans generally share a universal morality, we have also (arguably) shared our technological knowledge for the most part. In periods where resources have concentrated to the few for any reason, there is a historical record of the humans furthest up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pursuing monumental public enterprises as recompense. 

Ramses II, succeeding in military conquest & stable rule, coordinated the construction of significantly more permanent statues and other forms of art as propaganda. In so doing, Ramses chose to “actualize” himself as immortal in the historical record,  however we refer to him as Ozymandias (the Greek derivative of his throne name). Why? Because the most popular reference in recent history, a poem by Perce Shelley, was inspired by one of his statues being looted and relocated to the British Museum. The poem covers 4% of known history, while the Ramses statue has existed for 65% of known history.

Likewise, two “captains of industry” from the the 19th century technological era, chose to imprint their name onto buildings and institutions, not unlike the practice of many long-lived businesses. Andrew Carnegie, known as a steel magnate with questionable societal impact, became successful because he introduced gains in production through technology and aggressively pursued scalability. Regardless of his choices and influence during his life, Carnegie realized that he wanted his values and his person to be celebrated, so he made a bunch of donations and built a bunch of monuments. Now, to be honest and fair, these contributions did go to libraries in particular, though we do need keep in mind that one of major formations in this charity was the Carnegie Corporation, a corporate homunculus of Carnegie’s to oversee his endowments postmortem. The Carnegie Corporation has existed for 2% of known history.

John D. Rockefeller is considered the wealthiest individual in modern history, but without getting lost in the ethical nature of his business dealings, we work from the point of accepting that in his success, John was incredibly charitable, in particular to his church, education, and the sciences, donating hundreds of millions of dollars by the early 20th century. The Rockefeller family currently has hundreds of billions of dollars in remaining wealth, but the thing to keep in mind are the cultural echoes that stay with us (for now).

30 Rock has existed for .3% of human history. 30 Rockefeller Plaza has existed for 1.8% of human history.

Two notable things: when wildly successful capitalists or autocrats “make it”, they try to be remembered for as long as possible, and we as the audience are often exposed to their monuments (and their name) without really thinking of the human being that has long since passed out of living memory.

I often think about this answer to the question of “Why Mars?”

It is one of the most existentially necessary facts of sentient life that we celebrate humans that achieve discovery over the unknown. We do not celebrate power or wealth to the same degree that we celebrate imaginative, ambitious adventures past frontiers that make our present quality of life possible. Humans are animals, and are compelled by greed for resources, but there is an undeniable scarcity of historical immortality reserved for inventors, explorers, and charismatic leaders. In truth, historical immortality is a nonrenewable resource, constantly diluted by generations of living memory until there is nothing left but a sterile footnote. This is the highest aspiration of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

We work on top of the Internet. IPv4 has existed for .8% of known human history. Bitcoin has existed for .25% of known human history. Our consumption of web apps, the resulting culture, and the ethics of web3 constitute mere basis points as far as human history is concerned. When I consider MoonDAO launching a DAO community member into space in July, I compare it to Apollo 11, a profound historical event that has only existed for 1% of human history. However, let’s not forget that a plethora of financial crises brought us to this point. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out 4.2% of U.S. GDP, and according to my wolfram alpha napkin math, hundreds of billions of dollars more than the Rockefeller family is worth. Recently in 2022, trillions of dollars have evaporated in the TradFi markets. The global food crisis is actively developing, and I don’t see an accurate prediction of the casualties from food riots and starvation.

The point to crypto has been to solve these problems, no matter what the international community and central banks fail to confront on their own. There used to be a lot of “Bitcoin fixes this”, but presently it doesn’t add up anymore. We have capitalized on the opportunity to contribute to public goods, we have used neutral protocols to capture the public eye. As far as historical footnotes go, I would rather prefer to be a member of ConstitutionDAO’s failure than Ken Griffin’s success.

In all honesty, though, what the hell were we doing? I’m conflicted, because I still think that we needed to make cultural impact before the full implementation of the technology, sophisticated as it is. However, considering our path as technologists and as a larger global society, my optimism about this being social-first movement has come to an end.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1466411377107558402?s=20

Frankly, I thought the upfront criticism of the “crypto casino” underestimated our ability to leverage a short-term local optimum, along with an abundance mindset, for the sake of allocating surplus capital to this sort of punctuated equilibrium of app-level improvement. Yeah, I was definitely wrong about that. It turns out that the more money got injected into the casino, the more unethical actors would show up, however the resources they extracted would include the social capital (and momentum) that optimally should have gone to the solar/lunarpunks. The actual outcome was a lot of grifting, and the net benefit to the ecosystem was completely negated by the systemic risk at the same time.

It’s difficult to reconcile that a lot of people in the space aren’t perfect, but they are incredibly talented and intelligent in other ways. The blackpill is that many do not have the vision, instead they develop or have retained some degree of professional cynicism that leads to a zero-sum outcome. In particular, we were dragged underwater by previously successful actors in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. In the next cycle, I very much anticipate that Madison Avenue and K Street will be orders of magnitude more active in web3 than they currently are. Without the fully implemented tech, this turns into a generation-wide black swan that may consume the intentions of Satoshi Nakamoto entirely.

There are also many actors (including wealthy nation-states) that have not reached unanimity for basic human rights or rule of law. This is not only dangerous, but with our responsibility to keep the technology open-source and neutral wherever we can, the propensity for dark triad actors to be in positions of responsibility and self-regulation that our ecosystem depends on is greater than ever. I think most of us were aware since the 2008 financial crisis that there were unchecked bad actors in the finance industry that posed such a systemic risk that the resulting government bailout was like chum in the water for the 2020 redistribution of wealth. The risk of governance failure and resulting breakdown of property rights in crypto is much higher than we acknowledge.

And of course, the political implication is that we cannot afford to pause or negate any flawed institution, because the vacuum is an opportunity for domination via collusion and brute force. Again, I stress that we need the full implementation of private social wallet networks, reputation-bound DAOs, and other collective bodies for all societal edge cases. We need these well before there can be a discussion of what our successive form of self-governance looks like. This is a logical problem, but there are many that will make it seem like a social or moral problem. Without enough checks and balances for anonymous actors that seek to subvert the system, we cannot fully onboard the global population and economy. I used to believe we could use trial-and-error and industrial precedent to pursue all the possible projects that interact with the ecosystem. However, now I see that there are fringe communities with charismatic leaders that will use any sort of morality or cynicism to convince themselves to grab as much capital and overall control as possible, no matter the externalized cost.

The epiphany kind of hit me recently. I realized that for all this natural tendency towards control and ideological purity, there was a clear and obvious overlap between the “we’ll build our own educational institution”, or “we’ll build our own citadel”, or “we’ll go to another country/planet”, other examples of voluntary isolation, and this man’s vision:

Now, I’m not going to say that this sentiment is an indictment of everyone’s character. It’s important to recognize that these talking points and these belief systems are ingrained and many of the victims are compelled through fear and mandates like “Keep Sweet, Pray, and Obey" (coined by the father of Warren Jeffs). The common theme is some dark triad perpetrator, a system of social control assented to, and reinforced by, an isolated group, a very strict control over the flow of information, and subordinate abdication of responsibility.

https://twitter.com/QwQiao/status/1540674520285069312

I’m not going to call the cult evil, but as far as critical thinking goes, members have limited cognitive competency. Most of the crimes involve some degree of ignorance, political language typically externalizes some moral nuances, and overall there is a general lack of historical, cultural, or even spiritual imagination. Instead, most of this sordid behavior involves personal ambition, shrewd opportunism, and most of all, the desire to dominate a group of adversaries while becoming more prominent within one’s own tribe. The desire to dominate becomes more prominent, normative thought in an echo chamber, and web3 is at its weakest in a de facto censorship-prone, exclusionary, & rivalrous echo chamber.

We need to be more vigilant. Web3 is not meant to be a continuation of the past historical cycle. The one thing we can control, and could have been used in past cycles, is transparency of knowledge. It’s more than permissible to take figures like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ramses or Columbus and point out how immoral they were, despite their upbringings. Nonetheless, we should learn what made them so powerful, so that we may not only prevent the same immoralities and disparities, but also not destroy the progress we’ve accomplished as free, sentient, and self-aware animals. This means bringing the sunlight anywhere and everywhere that web3 touches. Knowledge is not just asymmetric power, it is freedom from subterfuge.

The Emancipation Proclamation has existed for 3% of known history. Women’s suffrage in the U.S. has been achieved for 2% of known history. The Civil Rights Act has existed for 1% of human history. The further that these have been introduced, the more our civilization has grown. The key factor is not just the state allowing more governance power, it is also our immutable historical record. Is there a large degree of regressive politics in the web3 social network? Yes, and if we relent enough, proponents of that will take the opportunity to wipe any mention of our freedoms, any mention of censorship-resistant, open-source economics, and any mention of human equality.

Speaking from anecdotal experience, I have seen how abusers react when caught in public. I have seen how they react when people around them learn to say “no, that’s wrong” and exercise free will. We need a lot more of that. The one thing that dark triad actors loathe is the discussion or control by parties of a higher power (even if that is just free speech in the public square). Any combination of bravery and self-sacrifice is both the greatest aspiration and the harshest anathema of the old world, and many understand that this world is filled with good people with nothing to lose.

There is a litmus test for genuine exploration of the frontier, and it begins with a common consensus: we universally know something to be true, we know there are ideals which will never reach unanimity, and while history may be influenced by the affluent and the powerful, these transient constructs will always surrender to the truth in time.