| Dear Hiveans | Liebe Hiver | Queridos Hiveanos |
|---|---|---|
| This is part 3 of my favourite excerpts from the book "Softwar" (goodreads) by Jason Lowery. | Dies ist Teil 3 meiner Lieblingsauszüge aus dem Buch "Softwar" (goodreads) von Jason Lowery. | Esta es la tercera parte de mis extractos favoritos del libro "Softwar" (goodreads) de Jason Lowery. |
“Great civilizations are not murdered. They commit suicide.” - Arnold Toynbee
Peter Turchin: “There is a pattern that we see recurring throughout history… When survival is no longer at stake, selfish elites and other special interest groups capture the political agenda. The spirit that ‘we are all in the same boat’ disappears and is replaced by a ‘winner take all’ mentality. As the elites enrich themselves, the rest of the population is increasingly impoverished. Rampant inequality of wealth further corrodes cooperation. Beyond a certain point a formerly great empire becomes so dysfunctional that smaller, more cohesive neighbors begin tearing it apart. Eventually the capacity for cooperation declines to such a low level that barbarians can strike at the very heart of the empire without encountering significant resistance. But barbarians at the gate are not the real cause of imperial collapse. They are a consequence...”
To be clear – the author is not arguing that society should end the practice of attempting to govern itself or manage resources using abstract power hierarchies codified via rules of law. Rules and rank-based abstract power hierarchies have no doubt helped facilitate cooperation and achieve extraordinary levels of resource abundance for sapiens across the world. The point is that abstract power hierarchies are trust-based and permission-based systems which are demonstrably insecure against corruption and invasion, and it is vital for societies to recognize these systemic security flaws.
[...] People believe that creating a rule of law to logically constrain abstract power across 100 people protects them from high-ranking people consolidating and abusing abstract power. It doesn’t; it just changes the way to consolidate and abuse abstract power.
| If current governments around the world continue their malfunctions and/or abuse of power, we may see peoples removing the current rank-based abstract power hierarchies. | Wenn die derzeitigen Regierungen auf der ganzen Welt ihr Versagen und/oder ihren Machtmissbrauch fortsetzen, werden die Völker vielleicht die derzeitigen rangbasierten abstrakten Machthierarchien abschaffen. | Si los gobiernos actuales de todo el mundo continúan con sus disfunciones y/o abusos de poder, es posible que veamos cómo los pueblos eliminan las actuales jerarquías de poder abstracto basadas en rangos. |
Zero-trust, permissionless, and non-systemically-exploitable control over resources are not the only sociotechnical benefits of warfare. Another major benefit of warfare that people overlook – one that is extremely relevant to a discussion about Bitcoin – is decentralization of abstract power and control authority over resources. In addition to making a population more secure against psychological exploitation and abuse, warfighting also gives people the ability to physically constrain other people’s abstract power and control authority. The ability to physically constrain abstract power represents the ability to physically decentralize abstract power hierarchies and its corresponding control authority over resources. In the author’s experience performing research for this theory, this seems to be one of the most underappreciated sociotechnical benefits of warfare. People don’t seem to understand that one of the biggest advantages of warfighting is that it allows sapiens to decentralize abstract power and control authority over their valuable resources. Warfighting is the reason why there is no single, centralized ruling class over all of the world’s resources. Despite several attempts, nobody in history has ever been able to establish a single ruling class precisely because of the physical constraints caused by warfighting. This concept can be very counterintuitive to people because many people (especially those people who don’t actually study or participate in warfare) have accused warfare as being a power consolidation mechanism rather than a power decentralization mechanism. These people will claim that warfare only gives people the ability to centralize their control authority and use it to oppress people. The reasoning often goes something like this: kings raise armies and then utilize those armies in military campaigns to capture more resources. Therefore, militaries are centralizing forces because rulers build and use them to grow and consolidate their abstract power and control authority over resources.
There are three problems with this line of reasoning. First, it makes no distinction between physical power and abstract power. People who make this argument treat physical power and abstract power as if they’re one-and-the-same thing when they’re clearly not the same. Why do they make this false correlation between abstract power and real power? We have already discussed one reason why: the logical fallacy of hypostatization. People don’t think about how they think about power.
A second problem with this line of reasoning is that it relies on linear-chain-of-events thinking rather than systems thinking. People who adopt this line of reasoning effectively blame the military for the king’s consolidation of abstract power for no other reason than the fact that a military campaign happened to be the most recent (or easiest to observe) thing in a linear chain-of-events preceding the consolidation or expansion of the king’s abstract power. In other words, they’re tacitly implying a direct causal relationship between military campaign and consolidation of power simply because of a temporal relationship, while willfully ignoring a host of other explanations that could equally explain why the king’s power has been consolidated. It’s not uncommon for wars to break out in addition to other factors like disease or famine or other disruptive factors which happen at the same time and could just as easily explain how a person could consolidate abstract power. Another perfectly valid explanation for why a king has more consolidated power following a military campaign is simply because more people choose to believe in the king’s abstract power for reasons separate than but temporarily correlated to the military campaign. A third problem with this line of reasoning is that it willfully ignores the fact that physical power has never been strictly necessary to create, codify, or consolidate abstract power and control authority over resources.
Why have sapiens fought and died by the millions over thousands of years? One answer is so they don’t have to suffer from the oppression of a ruling class they know they cannot trust. Warfighting could just as easily be described as a more than 10,000-year struggle to prevent global consolidation of abstract power and control authority over valuable resources. Sapiens have demonstrated very clearly that they would sooner risk nuclear annihilation than adopt a single ruling class. In fact, in every example of history where an emerging ruling class has attempted to gain too much abstract power and control authority over the world’s natural resources or have tried to consolidate everyone under a single empire, society has responded with massive-scale wars, utilizing physical power as the mechanism for adjusting the difficulty of achieving that much control. In other words, warfighting is functionally identical to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work protocol. By participating in a highly energy-intensive, global-scale physical power competition, agrarian society enjoys the complex emergent benefit of decentralized control over their resources.
Warfare gives our species an opportunity to overthrow or delegitimize abstract power when it becomes exploitative or abusive. With the ability to physically constrain and delegitimize abstract power comes the ability to physically decentralize control authority. Proof of this complex emergent behavior can easily be verified by simply noting how our species chooses to partition its territory. The reason why the dry surface area of the Earth has been partitioned across 195 different countries is largely the result of the wars fought to decentralize those territories. If warfighting can decentralize our control authority over land, then it stands to reason that it can decentralize our control authority over other assets too – including digital resources like bits of information. The question is really about how it might be done, not if it could be done.
We live with the immense burden of being prisoners trapped behind our own prefrontal cortices. We cannot see or experience the world as it is, we can only experience a version of the world that has been filtered through a minefield of emotionally-charged abstract thoughts and symbolism. Like looking through a pair of rose-tinted glasses, sapiens look at the world through ideology-tainted glasses. This makes it very difficult to present arguments about the benefits of warfare on society without it being complicated by abstract ideas like ethics, morals, theologies, or modern politics. The solution? Simply don’t call it warfare. Call it something else like primordial economics.
Pacifism causes populations to adopt the exact opposite strategy they need to remain safe and secure. They cause populations to become weak, complacent, docile, and unfit to survive in a congested, contested, competitive, and hostile environment filled with predators and entropy.
[…] warfare creates a counterintuitively positive dynamic of creative destruction where agrarian society channels its resources to the most stable, cooperative, and productive societies capable of sustaining high-functioning cooperative relationships for the longest amounts of time. In other words, warfare creates trickle-up dynamics where natural resources flow to the most well-organized and cooperative civilizations.
But comparatively speaking, nation states are very new, and we don’t know if they’re a
properly-functioning, long-term survival strategy for our species.
[…] hundreds of millions of people (even billions of people in some cases like China) must trust hundreds of people not to exploit their abstract power and control authority over the population’s most valuable resources. Why would people agree to this? If Turchin’s theory is valid, it’s because it’s existentially necessary for survival. This would imply that modern agrarian society effectively backed itself into a corner with another strategic Schelling point. We must adopt massive-scale abstract power hierarchies because it is the only way to survive against our neighbor’s massive-scale abstract power hierarchies. But as a result of adopting these massive-scale abstract power hierarchies, we entrap ourselves.
| So, because there are a**hole governments like Russia's, everybody else needs a government to protect them against these predators. | Weil es also Arschloch-Regierungen wie die russische gibt, brauchen alle anderen eine Regierung, die sie vor den anderen schützt. | Así que, como hay gobiernos de mierda como el de Rusia, todos los demás necesitan un gobierno que les proteja de estos depredadores. |
So far, all we have to go on to determine if nation states are a good idea is a statistically irrelevant sample of about 200 years’ worth of data. That data is inconclusive, to say the least. It’s filled with many of the best examples of sapient aspiration and achievement that would have never been possible if it weren’t for the extraordinarily high scales of cooperation that nation states enabled. Through the cooperation and coordination of our nation states, we walk on the moon and build international space stations. But at the exact same time, we carpet bomb cities and drop nuclear warheads on them. Many of the worst examples of destruction ever experienced by sapiens have occurred in the past 200 years.
Imagine, if instead of trying to replace physical power with abstract power, that people learn to accept there is no replacement for physical power, and we instead sought to replace kinetic power with electric power. If we could figure out a way to use non-lethal, electric warfare that still enabled global-scale strategic power competitions to settle disputes, manage resources, and establish a pecking order, then we might be able to break this cycle. If only there were a global-scale physical power projection technology out there to which society had zero-trust, egalitarian, and permissionless access… enter Bitcoin.
Warfare could be Described as a Blockchain. A block of time will pass where people can enjoy a reprieve from this global-scale physical power competition. This reprieve is so revered it’s given a special name: “peace.” And then when enough time has passed for people to become complacent, the population will forget how painfully predictable they are, the predators will return, and the whole process starts over again. These blocks of time link together linearly, forming a chain of time blocks, or a blockchain. The winners of this continuous global power competition are given the privilege of writing history, which is nothing more than a globally distributed ledger that keeps account of who has control of what and what the general state of consensus is regarding the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of the world’s resources.
Peace is not an option so long as predators exist. Peace has never been a replacement to war, it has only been a name that we assign to a state of reprieve between wars, when people are competent and trustworthy enough with their abstract powers to settle our disputes, manage our resources, and establish our pecking order without needing physical power. But as 10,000 years of evidence would suggest, peace doesn’t last. It is as fleeting and as fragile as the imaginary power it gives to people and entrusts them not to abuse. Like clockwork, our abstract power hierarchies become dysfunctional, and the next war comes.
To improve our own capacity to survive and prosper, it is vital for us to understand that there is no such thing as a substitute to physical power as a zero-trust, permissionless, and egalitarian basis for settling disputes and establishing pecking order, no matter how much people like to preach about alternatives. If it’s true that agrarian society has stalemated itself at a global-scale strategic level with nuclear warheads, then that means agrarian society has never been more vulnerable to the threat of unimpeachable systemic exploitation and abuse than it has ever been in the past 10,000 years of populations suffering from the oppression of their god-kings.
To understand the hazard we could be in, simply ask “what are the complex emergent social benefits of warfare that society would lose in a kinetic stalemate?” The author has already enumerated these benefits, but to summarize to top four: (1) zero-trust, permissionless, and egalitarian control over resources, (2) the ability to physically resist, constrain, and decentralize dysfunctional abstract power hierarchies, and (3) the existential motivation to innovate and cooperate at increasingly higher scales, and (4) the ability to vector limited resources to the strongest and most intelligent members of the pack who are demonstrably the best suited to survive in a world filled with predators and entropy.
After hitting the kinetic ceiling with strategic nuclear warheads, society appears to be attempting to back themselves out of a corner by turning to non-nuclear kinetic warfare. The Korean War, Vietnam War, and the Global War on Terror are some examples of nuclear superpowers deliberately choosing to use weaker and less efficient power projection technologies to settle their disputes. Why would nuclear superpowers deliberately choose to use weaker and less efficient power projection technologies? Because it might be the only way kinetic power can still be useful as a basis for setting disputes and establishing pecking order. In other words, non-nuclear kinetic power might be the only way that a kinetic war can still have winners.
Nations have started to realize that the best way to make their non-nuclear kinetic power projection technologies more efficient at projecting power is to take humans out of the loop. Software-operated drones are replacing human-operated machines. The size, weight, and power of these drones are collapsing. They’re starting to fly in swarms. They’re starting to drop bombs on people’s heads with extraordinary precision. They’re starting to think for themselves and predict human behavior better than humans can. The marginal cost of putting precisely the right amount of kinetic power in precisely the right place to impose the maximum amount of physical cost on attackers is plummeting thanks to drones. We’re getting extremely good at kinetically striking people with surgical-like precision for cheap. At the same time, other technologies like artificial intelligence are converging. We are marching straight towards the dystopian future envisioned by the Wachowskis in The Matrix, where swarms of sentient killer robots patrol the skies over the ruins of their creators.
Now we finally arrive at a core insight about human physical power projection tactics which is essential for understanding the potential national strategic implications of Bitcoin. As much as people wish for it, there can be no peace, because peace requires a world without predators – a world which doesn’t exist. Consequently, if we stalemate ourselves with kinetic warfare, we don’t create an environment without predators, so we don’t get peace. Instead, we create a huge window of opportunity for predators to exploit us through our belief systems at unprecedented scale because they cannot be physically challenged or overthrown.
A stalemate forces people into adopting abusive and exploitative abstract power hierarchies teeming with corruption because people lose the option of settling their disputes and establishing their pecking order in a zero-trust and egalitarian way using physical power. And if society tries to fork the evolution of kinetic power projection technology into a non-nuclear direction, they aren’t going to solve the paradox of kinetic power projection; they are just going to discover another path to mutually assured destruction and find themselves stuck in the same bounded prosperity trap we’re already stuck in, with the exact same systemic security vulnerabilities. The most that can be gained from continuing down the kinetic path could be minor victories against asymmetrically weak nations, not strategic victories against peers.
How does society escape from this trap? Nature offers an idea: antlers. We need a technology that will allow us to continue to use physical power as the basis for settling our disputes, managing our resources, and establishing our pecking order in a zero-trust and egalitarian way, while still keeping ourselves systemically secure by empowering us to impose severe physical costs on our attackers – but we need a way to do this that either minimizes or eliminates the need to kill our own kind. To accomplish this, we need a different, non-kinetic form of physical power projection technology that could allow us to engage in global-scale physical power competitions in a zero-trust and egalitarian way, but non-lethally and non-destructively. It needs to be a power projection technology that will not become increasingly impractical to use as people become increasingly more efficient at projecting physical power and imposing severe physical costs on their neighbors. This new form of physical power projection technology should never be too efficient to be practically useful, no matter how efficient we try to make it.
[…] Here we uncover a remarkable idea: the future of global-scale strategic warfighting is perhaps more likely to be a form of electronic warfare rather than a form of kinetic warfare. Why? For the simple reason that kinetic warfare is literally a dead end for agrarian society. Society could have already stalemated itself by identifying a kinetic path to mutually assured destruction where wars can’t be conclusively won, and disputes can’t be conclusively settled. There might be very little to gain by identifying yet another kinetic path to mutually assured destruction.
To put it simply, if sapiens are going to evolve antlers so they can continue to engage in global power competitions to settle property and policy disputes and establish pecking order in a zero-trust and egalitarian way that can’t be kinetically stalemated, it seems highly likely they’re going to be electronic antlers. Electric power projection technology would allow a population to keep themselves physically secure against systemic predators while the kinetic stalemate would continue to keep them secure against foreign invaders. The resulting electric power competition would also preserve a zero-trust, permissionless, and egalitarian way for settling disputes, determining who gets control over resources, and achieving consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of property.
This idea isn’t new; it’s actually more than a century old. Tesla predicted something like this in his essay entitled “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy.” Tesla predicted the kinetic power projection paradox in 1900. He already saw the potential for kinetic power projection to scale to the point where it would no longer be useful as a basis for engaging in physical disputes.
To that end, it is reasonable to believe that nations will continue to compete against each other in global-scale physical power competitions to settle their disputes and their establish pecking order in a zero-trust, permissionless, and egalitarian way, but they will learn how to do it increasingly more electronically rather than kinetically. They will extend the battlefield into a new domain, where battles can still be won – where people can still physically secure the resources they value.
The key to a sustainable peace that is safe against systemic predators therefore appears to be some form of electronic warfare. Whereas kinetic power competitions lead to mutually assured destruction and stalemates that place society into a systemically vulnerable pickle where they can be exploited at unprecedented scale by abstract power hierarchies, electric power competitions lead to mutually assured preservation.
Tesla essentially predicted that software would lead to soft war – that a lasting peace could be achieved if agrarian society could figure out a way to wage wars by having their machines battle other machines using great sums of energy, and humans watched eagerly from the sidelines.
At this point, the reader may be wondering, “what does all of this talk about abstract power, abstract power hierarchies, physical power, warfare, and intraspecies property disputes have to do with software?” The answer is simple: it has everything to do with software, because in the 21st century, many of the world’s largest abstract power hierarchies are software-encoded abstract power hierarchies. For example, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Amazon are all software-encoded abstract power hierarchies. Every person or institution that has centralized control over our computer networks or our computer programs (from which we tacitly need their permission to send, receive or store our digitized information)is operating within an abstract power hierarchy.
Using power projection theory as a new frame of reference, we can observe the state of the world and see the signs of systemic exploitation and abuse of our digital information practically everywhere. Weaponized misinformation, troll farms, bot farms, sybil attacks, DoS attacks, hacking epidemics, widescale online fraud, online censorship, shadow banning, routine data leaks, state-sponsored surveillance through entertainment apps, social network targeting campaigns, software companies routinely running ethically questionable social experiments on their users, unsupervised artificial intelligence controlling the primary information streams of billions of people, social media networks being captured by special interest groups, and amidst all of this, no reasonable expectation of privacy for any activity online. No matter where you go online, no matter what you do online, it’s become standard practice for your valuable bits of information to be censored, surveilled, or sold to the highest bidder. Our bits of information are under the centralized control of the people who control our computer networks and the software running on those networks. Meanwhile, software companies are becoming asymmetrically wealthy and influential thanks to the data they’re harvesting from the population. The evidence of population-scale systemic exploitation of people through their software is mounting. Except this time, the resource that technocratic god-kings are competing for control over is digital information.
Hive may help here, too.
10,000 years of warfare would suggest that the most effective way to keep people’s rights secure against attackers is to figure out a way to impose severe physical costs on attackers.
[…] Enter Bitcoin. With a background in Power Projection Theory now thoroughly established, we can see Bitcoin in a new light. Bitcoin is compelling not as a candidate monetary system, but as an electro-cyber security system. Bitcoin’s underlying proof-of-work technology is proving itself to be a successful way to physically secure bits of information against systemic exploitation and abuse by giving people the ability to project physical power to impose severe physical costs (costs denominated in watts) on belligerent actors who try to exploit them through their software. Bitcoin demonstrates that people can gain and maintain zero-trust, permissionless, egalitarian, and decentralized control over bits of information so long as they are willing and able to project physical power to secure it. This would suggest that Bitcoin isn’t merely a monetary system, but perhaps some kind of “soft” form of power competition that has successfully replicated the same complex emergent benefits of warfare, but without the destructive side effects. Through the ongoing global adoption of Bitcoin, people appear to be building the largest physical-power-based dominance hierarchy ever created in human history, and the sociotechnical implications of this could be extraordinarily disruptive to all existing power hierarchies, including and especially nation states.
| It's a long book, and I will follow up with one last post with excerpts. | Es ist ein langes Buch, und ich werde einen weiteren Post nachreichen. | Es un libro largo, y seguiré con un otro extracto. |
Have a great day,
zuerich
