CCP, NYT, BTC
Communist Capital, Woke Capital, Crypto Capital
Loyalty, Voice, Exit
Hard Power, Soft Power, Hard Money
AI, social media, web3
Drones & surveillance, community & narrative, currency & economics
One leader, few leaders, many leaders
Autonomous DAO — a group that interacts with a truly self-running smart contract with no admin keys and no CEO
Bureaucratic DAO — a mess of politics
CEO DAO — a single clear leader
Yes, I’m well aware that the A in DAO in theory already stands for “autonomous”, but today’s DAOs mostly aren’t autonomous — so the distinction is worth making.
A non-obvious point is that a single decision maker in a CEO DAO may protect user rights more reliably than the groupthink of a bureaucrat DAO.
No decision makers (autonomous) or one decision maker (CEO) can both be better than a group of decisionmakers (bureaucratic).
First, get people online.
Then, connect the world.
Next, observe that these new connections cause new conflicts by obviating old borders we didn't know existed.
Add crypto to restore digital rule of law.
Finally, rebundle society after the coming unbundling.
Provable patriotism
When something becomes highly abundant, its scarce complement becomes valuable. Given infinite peanut butter, people want jelly.
So, when we enhance technological exit to the nth power, the systems that arise will be those that engender genuine loyalty.
The primary censorship tactic used today is to single out one actor, then pile so much cost on them that they buckle. In other words, the mechanism used against ostensibly free speech is to increase the cost of speech.
But this tactic doesn’t work against a sufficiently decentralized blockchain. The cost of censoring or reversing a single transaction now soars into the billions, and is technically hard to boot.
A fickle mob wants only to impose costs, not bear them. They won’t pay to censor.
This is why moving functionality on-chain changes the game, and why our first priority to protect civil liberties must be technological decentralization.
The non-consensus bet is that many Bernie supporters may eventually become Bitcoin maximalists.
Why? They are more concerned with economics than wokeness. And some see that the printed money isn’t going to the poor but the rich. Once they lose faith in the state, BTC is there.
But inflation could be the left’s Iraq. Huge swaths of the right flipped on the state once their trust in US military intervention just led to losses for all, American & Iraqi alike.
So too for left trust in US economic intervention, after inflation?
It’s just like conservatives starting out as gung-ho supporters of US military intervention, seeing that fail, and then flipping completely into becoming isolationists.
MMT will impoverish the poor, not benefit them. And that may cause them to flip on US economic intervention.
State Dept spokesman asserts Russians are pre-positioning the equivalent of crisis actors, is asked for evidence beyond mere assertion, refuses to provide it to protect sources and methods.
Of course one might just trust the government. But not anymore.
Fascinating on several levels
- A media corp employee who doesn’t just trust the US government
- A government that isn’t trusted on its claims
- A public that trusts neither
After Steele Dossier, Snowden, Iraq WMD, babies in incubators, and Tonkin Gulf — feels like a milestone.
The most interesting part is seeing the media corporation employee call the federal government employee the source of Alex Jones-like conspiracy theories.
This is an inadvertent admission that something can be false even if the US government says so. And if a media corp says so.