How do we get from here to there? | binary-chaos
I think there are ways out. I think what has been built is an easy path for one type of outcome that self optimizes to the brutalist nature in humans. The expression of traits under conditions defines the output. However, I don’t think that this path that has been taken is anywhere near the most optimum based on how evolution designed us to work. Once property got mixed into the game and we were able to define survival probability positives through better exploitation and this created the option for a lot more humans to exist, the narrative of control and domination was just the path of least resistance if what you seek is an accelerationist model. Ignoring questions of ethics it could be an extremely effective way to live if the given system at hand was controllable and the resources available were infinite. As in it does work very well at building systems fast. But as we know the greater system is neither controllable nor infinite, and at this point, we have enough history to plainly see what the outcome of continuing this path will be.
Where I found the most reassurance is in realizing that our nature is not to be brutal first and then to have to tame the beast. This part I think a lot of people get backward. Our nature is to cooperate first and build small social dynamics that automatically contain the necessary feedback mechanisms that create accountability, without creating controlling structures to make it happen. The rationalist model thinks of things in relation to control, whereas the naturalistic social models we spent most of our evolutionary time in and were optimized for did not require control. Once I fully understood this, and also understood Dunbar’s number, it became pretty obvious what way we could live which would make the existing power structures unnecessary and irrelevant. Groups of autonomous “tribes” or communities that stay under 200 people. As the structures of the evolved human brain work at its best social capacity within this kind of total interdependence.
The problem of scale and the alienation of the individual have given rise to domination as the best survival strategy. Whoever can exploit the most effectively wins, as long as they don’t dominate too effectively and wreck everything. For a long time, even the domination models worked because the greater natural system was still complex enough and large enough to absorb the damage caused in our attempts to control everything, until of course in our desire to expand we extracted too much from the system and started to reduce the complexity enough that the system is hitting the tipping points beyond which it can absorb. I think a kind of retro-futurist outcome is our best bet. We’ve learned a massive amount through the use of accelerationist domination exploitation models for sure. No reason to throw any of that out. But I think going back to a “primitive” social model answers almost all problems that exist for humans. I like to call it a kind of techno-tribal strategy. A naturalistic anarchism that creates a value structure that we are always seeking anyway, where value and purpose are created and defined through our individuated social relationships in full interdependence with our “tribe”. No rulers or police or laws need to be codified into a post-emergent cultural operating system. We take the technology we’ve developed and use it to build a global decentralized system of tribal networks. No nation-states or even city-states, as soon as you scale beyond Dunbar’s number you unintentionally reduce the necessary social complexity needed to keep our nature where it operates best, and start requiring the creation of controls to fix the problem of our nature expressing its dissatisfaction with alienating social models. At these smaller scales, every person defines the whole, in literally the only real democratic system there can be. Everything done above that scale requires efforts to correct for bad actions in humans. As the hierarchies form to deal with behaviors from those actors who disagree with the social prescriptions, more and more control has to be created to compensate for a bad model.
What I’m still trying to understand is the transitionary model to get humans out of the existing systems without it having to be so completely horrible. As we know these power systems are not just individuals, but superorganisms. And as any organism is compelled to do they will take any measures possible to them to stay alive. This poses a massive problem. Revolution isn’t a solution because it just changes the heads within the same power structure. Revolt and collapse are an answer but at the scales we are at now just boggle the mind for how bad that looks to be. And the tendency for humans to create the same damn failure model over and over means you still have to get the ideas into enough minds to stop the rebuilding of the same thing.
The Buckminster Fuller idea that the key is to build new systems that make the old ones irrelevant is probably where we’d want to look, but I still can’t find the right memetic key to spread the ideas well enough in a landscape where the current narratives have shit tons of resources behind them to conditions people’s mind with. I do think we can make a better world. How to get there and to make it very clear how bad an idea it is to keep using the same property based hierarchies of domination is another thing. Appealing to our nature is good, and some systems might come into play which will sideload the ideas anyway.
UBI is an interesting one for this. I think it’s possible that instead of it creating a dependence on the state it will end up doing the opposite. It will allow people to form real community connections where the value created by people actually having time to participate and volunteer will rebuild the value structures of connection without that even being the intention. Then the people form interdependence and realize they can start producing what they need without the centralized feeding tubes that exist and destroy everything to supply people’s needs. Things like this will naturally build collective power, which is the only real power we have to take on consolidated state level at scale power.
Because it will resocialize people and de-alienate them, they will naturally start understanding the power and anti-fragility of these direct and interdependent social networks. Things like this could paint a picture and spread memetically successfully enough to be more attractive than the efforts to advertise value can.
And as for how to exchange monetary value without central control… This solution is being built now with crypto currency. Bitcoin and the Satoshi Nakamoto consensus model of trustless decentralized currency give us what we need to exchange without the few controlling the many. Chia is the new version i’m investing in to help support what could very realistically be a post-statist economy.
I am trying to fully break it all down and see the paths that aren’t just totally horrible. We’ll see.
Originally published at https://www.binary-chaos.net.
