Fixing the global economy is the key to fixing the world.

The best tool to fix the global economy is the blockchain.

In this thread I'm going to discuss why the blockchain age is just starting, and how AI factors into the creation of a new economy on-chain.

#Thread Let's start with the problem statement. There is a #polycrisis which is, broadly speaking, caused by a single problem: the human race is asking more of nature than nature can sustain. Nature is dying under the load. When it breaks it will take us with it.

https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1586759630482464769

"Hey @Mattereum folks, what do you think about Amazon's announcement they're going to get into the physical NFT business?"

Well funny you should ask, I do happen to have some thoughts about that.

Let's start at the beginning: what is Amazon really?

https://twitter.com/waleswoosh/status/1633061326971871232

Amazon has four fundamental assets: relationships (your credit card, their wholesalers), physical warehouses, web infrastructure, and behavioural data from billions of purchases.

In the age of AI, the behavioural data is probably worth the most.

So why NFTs & blockchain?

The problem we all face is that our current lifestyles — even for poorer people in the first world — rely on constant exploitation of nature and other humans.

This is the bedrock situation.

Everything else rests on this system. We do not believe it can be fixed so we ignore it. I spent time homeless. I grew up poor. Racism was never a direct problem for me, but the times when it did flare I got some sense of how it was for people who were more impacted. I spent a lot of time in nature, I felt the problem.

Maybe I’m unusually immersed. Too much reality.

A very quick thread on *theories of value* for crypto - why is this industry worth working in, what's going on, what went wrong, and what comes next.

Let's start with the primal root: 1) Bitcoin is a hedge against US dollar inflation.

Yep. Deflationary money is "better" money. 2) Transactional efficiency: a wire transfer takes four days and goes wrong 5% of the time. It's simply easier and cheaper to send tokens. This is truer than ever because of L2s.

3) Ponzi schemes. Why take a slice when you could just eat the entire cake?

Hugely profitable :-(

I want to talk a little about twitter, governance, the FTX implosion, effective altruism, exit/voice/loyalty, and the situation in Iran. Here's a good video on Iran, listen to vocal tone!

https://twitter.com/FridaGhitis/status/1590509414066200576?s=20&t=ewjNQxJxnl1aDcshfqnXfQ

Call it a quick outline of a grand theory.

Beginning thread now.

https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1590475670043643904

The combination of crypto and social media (here, mainly TikTok rather than twitter) has kept an entire generation of talented people out of politics.

The men mostly went to crypto. The women mostly went to TikTok.

It takes a *lot* of charisma and skill to make TikTok work.

People love to make this shit complicated. It's a profession.

It's not complicated: we're using *far too much stuff* because we have no design discipline for "human satisfaction with minimal footprint" and no law to enforce that discipline.

Everything is downstream of that.

https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1586410646639460357

Nearly everything is toxic if you do it 8 **billion** times, right down to brushing your teeth with a plastic toothbrush.

The first world high consumption niche is *gratuitously* and vehemently unsustainable on every single axis: power, water, toxics, ag footprint.

It must stop

This guy - “Eric Patton” - was far out on the right wing. Smart, polite, realistic: somebody facing the global resource crisis head on, and suggesting we save the people that invented science and universalist democracy first.

If he comes back I look forwards to continuing debate

https://twitter.com/leashless/status/822881026129199108

When the right wing were driven off twitter we lost the Anvil needed for the Hammer to beat the crooked steel of opinions into the forged steel of truth.

The debate is necessary: deplatforming makes our entire society dumber by silencing the Lawful Evil contingent!!!

Look, a fair number of men "man up" when they're going into a board meeting or a rough bar, and "man down" when they're interacting with little old ladies or children.

The idea that *some men* take this to a further extreme shouldn't be controversial: pre-trans Izzard position.

https://twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham/status/1586096672010010630

The place where this gets complicated is here: a person's emotional state or sense of being *then becomes defined as the legal definition of gender*.

That done, a whole set of laws, regulations etc. get updated. Direct conflicts occur in areas like rugby or swimming, and more.

Right. You want a better world? A safer world? A world that works?

Let me tell you *exactly* how to get one. No muss, no fuss, I'm aiming for a fifteen tweet manifesto on how we fix all of this shit, bolts to satellites, decision-making to economics, tax to stocks.

Ready? 1/15 Let's talk about the "exploitable edge." This is a single fact we can use as an *efficiency gradient* to fix the world.

Here it is: getting security for one family is incredibly expensive ($millions). But security for a society is remarkably cheap.

Socialized medicine etc. 2/15

I’ve been looking back recently on my subculture - burners, and hippies. Roughly the hippies are the 1960s wave of psychedelia and culturally most of the ayahuasca scene builds on that. Emotionally mushy. Burners from the 1990s are emotionally tougher and take on more challenges. This changes how communities operate. “Healing” is paradigmatically huge for hippie and hippie spirituality. Burners are more about “leadership” and initiation. A bit more vanguard. You could say more masculine energy but that’s kind of a tricky read - better to say survivalist!

I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with money, at least the way we are doing money.

We’re using money to move *lifespan* from one being to another.

Last year I spent a lot of money fixing my teeth. If I was poor it would have been extractions, not crowns. I’d feel much older Now this function of moving lifespan around is not limited to humans.

Take a field. On its own 50,000 things will grow, most of them inedible to humans. But that’s nature doing nature.

Then a hard push to make the fiend grow corn. You remove other life and concentrate on corn.

A fantastic question that's well-timed for where my head is at.

Let us discuss 21st century politics: the politics of *scale*, and the end of colonialism.

https://twitter.com/Paul08113166/status/1555919084021235714

So let's start with a quick history of The State.

The State collects taxes and uses them to pay for protection. The underlying economic activity changes what's protected

1) Feudal states protect agriculture.

2) Colonial states protect trade.

3) Nuclear states protect secrets.

In a volatile, chaotic society people fight and scramble to get to the top of the pile looking for some stability and safely

The more people have safety and security, the less energy is wasted in competition.

Reducing / socialising risk is *cheap*. Massive social conflict costs Which is to say that basic income coupled with massive reorganisation of the production systems is almost certainly the way towards fixing the environmental impact of our societies.

The change is going to hurt a lot of people. Cheap safety and stability is a payoff we can afford

Let's talk a little bit about the next 20 years.

In cased you hadn't noticed, climate shit is getting weird. I have no allergies now: all the grass is dead. First year it has been this way.

And you've seen the govt. performance on covid: in a crisis they've got nothing. More >> Next thing up, Ukraine. Floods of arms, desperate struggle. Global impact: Europe's dirty deals on Russian gas come undone. It should be pretty obvious now that the governments are *not* holding any deep reserves of competence here.

Under serious pressure it'll be a *bloodbath*.

There are almost no political ideologies or religions which accurately understand the relationship between *8 billion* human beings and Nature.

Only a handful more understand industrialisation.

Almost none understand AI. The few that do have all gone kind of mad in the process. This gap, between our deepest world models and reality comes from an inadequate theory of knowledge. In conventional thought things are either true or false.

“We don’t have enough evidence yet” is not a thing that fits into most world models.

But without it philosophy flounders

Woke up in the middle of the night with a creeping dread that it’s the early stages of the collapse of civilisation. Just a moment of panic like when you think you’ve lost your wallet but it’s in the other pocket.

No it’s going to be fine, right? They’ll sort out the food crisis And then the other dread. The rational dread.

By the time you’re reassuring yourself that “they” will sort out the food crisis, you’re already in collapse. Maybe it will recover, maybe it won’t, but it means civilisation has already frayed down to the bone.

“Global food crisis”

The world is pretty clearly going off the cliff that resilience people warned you about 10 years (or more) ago. Collapse of complex societies stuff, pandemic/supply chain/financial crisis.

It’s just a mess. Plus war.

I wish we could get people to pay attention to what matters. Comprehensive re-engineering of the systems which provide our basic biological needs has to happen. End homelessness, death from lack of health care.

Spend our free time partying and exploring space and stuff. Everything we need physically to achieve this is here, pretty much.

The "get the Roe vs. Wade angst out in a lump" plan seems to have basically worked. I spent *a decade* trying to get people to prioritise abortion rights defense. It was important to me. It was fitted in around the climate work but it was important to me.

But what's gone is gone Not to say it won't get fixed. It will, eventually, somehow.

But it's another marker of a rising tide. Shit is breaking down. Leonard Cohen's The Future and all that.

It's not like we can't fix it: you can see reality *rolling back up hill* around Elon Musk's work for example.

Feeling kinda old and tired. This abortion thing kinda has me down.

Odds are it's going to take years to fix. The political costs may be spectacular. It may radicalise a generation, as the Vietnam War did - and the death toll might be pretty similar (60k USA deaths in Vietnam). I'm trying to get as much of it as I can out of my system at the weekend so I don't have a "bad politics" hangover through the week, that sucking-grinding noise like a waste disposal unit on a sink.

I want to do more, and I just do not have any cards to play. I'm not even in US.

Getting to the point where I’m going to have to spend less time paying attention to the news

Too much broken shit I have zero influence over. Even areas where I tried to seed good ideas are now so far gone there’s just not even a slight possibility of exerting positive influence Like abortion. The only meaningful advice I’ve had on abortion rights was:

1) defending abortion must take precedence over all other feminist causes: it is the foundation.

2) reproductive age women need to start evacuating red states.

For years people have argued against both

AWGMI? is a much more complicated question than it appears.

You see, crypto is happening in a world that also contains 50C/122F in populated areas, an upcoming global famine, an ongoing struggle against fascism, and war.

All at once. I know how to help.

medium.com/humanizing-the… People often mistake our global situation as being a zero sum game: rich vs. poor, black vs. white and so on.

If that were true, we would indeed be fucked. But it's not, it's ALWAYS four sides.

Side A, side B, entropy, and The Unknown. There is no dualism in. nature, not really