Thread by @MattPirkowski

What lies beyond Capitalism and Communism?

Scalable Communal Valerism.

The technologies to obviate monetary coherence are nascent, but here.

Sustainable behavior requires increasingly direct representations of cost and value, not dis-intermediated by money.

It's now possible.

Consider that the original monetary systems were higher-dimensional representations of abstract social value (think shells, quipu, etc).

These did not scale well as civilizations structurally deepened, and we thus moved toward more "liquid" forms of representation: e.g. coinage.

Why "liquid"?

Because it implies the reduction of friction.

The capacity to flow.

Ultimately, we sacrificed representative capacity for efficiency.

But what else did we sacrifice?

For one, we traded the contextual history of accumulated wealth for an impoverished accounting.

Why does that matter?

Because it essentially amounts to the destruction of information.

Of course, in a world where we relied upon Westphalian States and Violence to ensure the integrity of a currency, it can be a good thing to destroy certain pieces of information.

But...

There's no free lunch.

The destruction of information comes at a cost.

It means that people can accumulate capital and use it to influence other systems outside their halo of reputation or expertise.

At small scale, this may be OK.

But empowered w/ today's tech & markets?

It is absolutely disastrous.

It is the primary driver of money-on-money returns, as @jim_rutt puts it.

After all, if our symbols of value come unmoored from the value-generating behaviors themselves, what else would we expect?

So, what to do?

Perhaps turn to biology...

Namely, much of the complexity within evolved biological systems has come into being through a process of discovering mutually symbiotic interactions between processes.

Kind of like our economy.

But without money.

Instead, it develops through functional coupling.

Of course, with respect to given sub-systems, there exist what might be classified as domain-specific "currencies".

Think blood cells, neurotransmitters, sodium / potassium ions.

But critically, there is no singular currency. "Currency" variance comports to specific function.

So what does the human analog look like?

It looks like the identification of networks of capacities capable of generating at least 80% of intra-network needs through new patterns of barter.

BUT DIDN'T WE CREATE MONEY TO AVOID THIS?

I hear you screaming into the monitor...

And the answer is yes.

But we also rode from town to town on horses at the time...

You see, since then we have constructed a global brain that can route information at the speed of light.

And this brain can do more than send simple monetary signals...

It can help us match our consumptive needs and generative capacities, as inputs and outputs respectively, more directly with the needs and capacities of values-aligned networks of individuals.

And it can do so far more effectively than was possible when such needs birthed money.

Additionally, because we can secure these networks from the prying eyes of bureaucrats and untrusted outsiders, we can take advantage of the fact that the accumulation of value should *always* come with an accounting of how said value was accumulated, preventing pathological arb.

For example, it's probably good to know whether someone has $1k because they taught children to read, or because they sold Fentanyl to your neighbor.

So long as the integrity of the monetary network isn't backed by violence, we want this information accessible to counterparties.

That is how we have held one another *accountable* to local values throughout our history, and we require a way to do this moving forward, if we are not to self-terminate, that *does not* look like what's presently going down in China via their Citizen Score.

But I promise...

That if we do not create a non-monetary system of value representation and exchange capable of displacing the present paradigm, it is only a matter of time before we all have a Citizen Score.

And like the majority of present day products sold in the US, it will be Made in China.

So for those interested in concepts such as #GameB, #Crypto, and the like, I ask that you break free, conceptually, of monetary path-dependence, and consider the possibility of more direct, technologically-enabled modes of forming what biologists would call "autocatalytic sets".

This phrase was coined in the Origin of Life field to describe the kind of systems that Kant himself described as those in which both parts and whole connect their flows such that they form a mutually support system.

Some, such as Maturana and Varela, call this autopoiesis...

And that's what we require for the 21st Century:

An Autopoietic Origin of Novel Economic Life.

A paradigm that abstracts less of our humanity away, behind the soulless faces of our monetary symbols.

Tools that allow us to form networks of value creation, absent parasitization.

It's a concept that carries forward the desirable elements of both Capitalist and Communist ideologies, but leaves their destructive and unsustainable tendencies behind.

It is a paradigm centered around the demonstration of actual value, as mediated by the relevant communities.

Of course it's no utopia.

Just a seed of novel possibilities.

It's a seed that–at least to me–appears both more desirable and more capable, but most importantly, more humane, than the mechanisms and tools by which we presently transform human behaviors into accountable flows.

*Yes, kind of.

The barter -> money narrative is incorrect as an origin story of monetary representation.

But it does accurately reflect how the complexity of mapping supply to demand exceeds individual capacity as # of products increases, hence the utility of abstract money.