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Can the World Computer save the world? ⊗ Imagining the future is just another form of memory ⊗ Notes are conversations across time

This week →{.caps} Can the World Computer save the world? ⊗ Imagining the future is just another form of memory ⊗ Notes are conversations across time ⊗ Lebanon as we once knew it is gone ⊗ They needed a virtual world, so they built one

A year ago →{.caps} The most clicked article in issue No.140 was A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse by David Graeber.

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Long issue but mainly because of my longer summary and multiple quotes from a three-parter by Vinay Gupta, lots to decompile in there but worth the extra words this week. One thing from those three that I didn’t include further down, the idea of redirecting “defence budgets to the actual threats we face, rather than being scared of other humans,” which is not new but a great way of framing it.

Can the World Computer save the world?

Part one of the three-parter is linked above, the other two are lower down, I encourage you to read all three as one long read. Vinay Gupta is a really smart guy, and has been in crypto for a long time so I’m not going to argue with what he’s saying and give the benefit of the doubt on passages that I might argue with at other times, and instead spend some more time reflecting on his views. Still, I’d say that the first part is pretty bleak, and the third quite optimistic about Ethereum and Mattereum, so perhaps read the whole as a thought experiment, or maybe even a speculative exercise. Initially accept the whole thing and think on it further.

Gupta’s goal with the trio of essays is to provide “a guiding narrative and vision for the blockchain industry fit for the current and oncoming conditions of the world.” He starts by establishing what went wrong with Bitcoin, where it went from libertarian socialist (Anarchist) to anarchocapitalist with the arrival of ASICs, and how Ethereum might keep away from the same issues.

In the second part, pay close attention to his explanation of world models, theories of change, and his own “Gupta model.” Those three things can also provide a useful light on what’s going on in the world. He also talks about the Ethereum blockchain as “a system that could out-perform current models of capitalism,” which is not that far from other views around crypto but phrased in a way I find useful and a framing that, at a minimum, feels like a possibility: out-competing capitalism instead of dismantling it (not my preference and multiple caveats here but lets keep those for another time).

In the third part Gupta goes over how the blockchain and his Mattereum project could accomplish this out-performing, and is logically the most speculative part of the whole. It’s also where it goes a bit too “computers can do anything” for me, but considering the solidity of his initial diagnostic, as I said in the beginning, I’m listening.

there is no doubt that if people have political freedom they will engage in trade. But if that trade creates a situation in which workers do not own the means of production — that is to say, the profit created from labour is returned to capital and not to labour — then markets move from being an expression of liberated circumstances to being just another instrument of oppression. […]
The correct value of many of our most “valuable” financial assets is zero.{.highlight} […]
But if we take out all the assets which are wiped out in a fully scale climate change scenario there is basically nothing left of the current economy: the oil companies are gone, coal, natural gas wiped out. Entire industries like almonds. Fishing. You can just go down the list: gone, gone, gone, wiped out, worthless, gone. Other industries rocket into existence: solar, wind, renewables, batteries, energy efficient construction, you name it. An entire universe goes, and a different one is created.{.highlight}

Part 2: World Models & Theories of Change

If our general world models do not match up, it is even less likely that our theories of change will match. Another way of saying this: if we cannot agree on the past and the present, it is unlikely we will agree on the future. […]
 This was, to me, the goal of Ethereum: to coordinate the world so we could increase efficiency, reduce waste, and take care of all of humanity’s concerns more effectively. […]
I wanted a system which could out-perform current models of capitalism (intensely wasteful and wrongfully productive) without requiring political turmoil to adopt. I wanted an evolution in the culture and the machinery of the market, to produce a world with carbon accounting and an end to world hunger because crops no longer rotted in the fields.{.highlight}

Part 3: Building an economy with a future

That seems like a fitting job for a World Computer: to run the global carbon accounting system which makes sure that trillions of dollars a year are spent planting trees and rewilding or grinding up olivine mountains to make sure that the earth does not dry out, burn up, and blow away. […]
Over time we can tighten up the waste in that system and enormously reduce the pressure we place on the land. We need to break open the silos to understand the performance of the system as a whole.

Imagining the future is just another form of memory

From back in 2017, Julie Beck for The Atlantic gives a good primer on how our brains imagine future possibilities through a remixing of our memories. Good read to consider alongside the idea that all creative endeavours build on what came before, so perhaps an analogous process.

Also intriguing to realize that lots of good forecasting and futuring is done by people with a background and/or a sharp awareness of history, and that AI is also using past data to extrapolate conclusions and ‘think.’ Finally, notice the concept of the “cultural life script” which puts words on something that I’ve thought of often and have even given as advice: think of what you want instead of following what’s expected. Now I have an established concept to refer to.

The first clue that memory and imagining the future might go hand in hand came from amnesia patients. When they lost their pasts, it seemed, they lost their futures as well. […]
“We can’t really imagine or think that far into the future, and we can’t remember that far back, if we don’t have this cultural life script as a kind of skeleton for our life story,” […]
[E]ven though they can dream up detailed, novel scenes of things yet to come, their imagined futures are really just projections of their pasts. The future holds more surprises—and, potentially, more disappointments—than we might predict.

Notes are conversations across time

Excellent short read packed with good ideas related to thinking through conversation, but also through writing, and then through writing for your future self with notes.

I’ll also parallel it again with AI but this time with Augmented Intelligence (the topic of the next members’ Dispatch, btw) where an algorithm might provide just enough ‘insight,’ and fetch just enough data from elsewhere, to provide a useful ‘partner’ to bounce ideas off of.

A conversation can happen between yourself and yourself, across time, through the notes your past self took for your future self. An autopoietic system where information time travels between your future and past self in a meaningful cybernetic loop.{.highlight} […]
Cybernetics shifts our focus away from objects, and toward the flow of information between objects. Design through the lens of Conversation Theory is not about features and screens. Design is the making and breaking of cybernetic feedback loops. […]
We can construct conversational feedback loops that help us learn a language, or give us programmable memory. We can construct conversational feedback loops that program creativity, or garden ideas from the bottom-up, or evolve ideas spontaneously.{.highlight}

Lebanon as we once knew it is gone

Horrible situation, especially because of the speed at which it has happened. This quote by the author, Lina Mounzer, summarizes the piece but also why I’m sharing it: “It is a preview of what happens when people run out of resources they believe are infinite. This is how fast a society can collapse. This is what it looks like when the world as we know it ends.”{.highlight}

The currency has lost over 90 percent of its value since 2019; 78 percent of the population is estimated to be living in poverty; there are severe shortages of fuel and diesel; society is on the verge of total implosion. […]
I’m behind on every deadline; I’ve written countless shamefaced emails of apology. What am I even supposed to say? “My country is falling apart and there’s not a single moment of my day that isn’t beholden to its collapse”? […]
The standards by which “normal” or “acceptable” living conditions are measured have long been discarded. People with the means to do so are leaving. Every week I say goodbye to a dear friend.

They needed a virtual world, so they built one

Good write-up by a group of artists and researchers from New York University who created a virtual space to replace the real ones during lockdowns. More useful in the short and medium term than 90% of the articles about the metaverse.

We realized we needed to turn the blank space we had created into a real place by giving people roles to fill or activities to participate in.{.highlight} […]
The future of digital social spaces is so exciting, because the further we go towards these new technological developments, the more we can weave back in the timeless behaviors and environments that make social connection possible in the first place.

Asides

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