Power Is the Problem, Not Privacy

Originally, this piece began as a response to Tobias Stone’s article Your Privacy is Over, but apparently, in addition to dark places to hide, Mr. Stone also enjoys exercising the power to squash dissenting opinions. And since responding to articles on Medium is really just a vain attempt to get noticed anyway, it’s probably best that I simply post it here.

If you haven’t read Stone’s article, please, give it a read (and some claps, if you’re into that shit). It’s super paranoid, defeatist, and great. For some context, I’ll summarize.

Soon quantum computers will be able to access and analyze everything about you, whether you posted it voluntarily or it was scraped from the giant Data Warehouse of Pervasive Surveillance in the sky. To quote,

“Not only will you have no privacy in the future — any privacy you thought you had in the past will vanish as well.”

While I agree that our current society is unfamiliar with such a paradigm, I struggle with the idea now circulating that privacy is the default, that we are somehow losing something that was previously inherent to the human condition.

In actuality, the reverse is true. Early societies lived almost wholly without privacy. And they were better off for it. In terms of a well functioning society, utter transparency is preferable to total privacy.

Now I grant that the situation to which the esteemed Mr. Stone alludes is a somewhat different dynamic than that of a small tribe of nomads. Still it seems that what he is really saying is that a tiny cohort of elite will be able to know everything about all of us, and that they will use that knowledge to their advantage. Which is an entirely different issue than whether or not complete transparency is a good thing.

The question then, in my mind, is not how we might conceal our imprudence, but who are these individuals and entities we’ve enabled to weaponize our own actions against us? And why are we allowing them this power?

Again, to quote Stone,

“Ultimately, everything will be tracked by the state, connected by ever more sophisticated algorithms, run on ever more powerful computers, until dissent becomes impossible and there is no escape. How do you oppose a system like that?”

By refusing to accept its legitimacy, for starters.

As Mr. Stone points out, this is the new reality, and it’s not going away. But it should be noted that these are our actions we’re talking about, and we should be accountable for them. In this sense, pure transparency is a benefit to society. The literal eye of God, motivating us to be the person we know we should be. It’s a mental construct humans have utilized for millennia, only made material. I’m not convinced I need to be afraid of it. And I certainly don’t believe that the solution lies in creating ways for people to avoid it.

In a Motherboard piece, Jason Koebler makes the case that we should, if not actively safeguard it, at least not naively cede our genetic code to large, centralized data stores. While this is generally wise advice, what it does more than anything is illustrate the real cause for concern. From a biological standpoint, our DNA is an immutable fact. It cannot be meditatively altered or changed, post conception, even if I wanted to. It is who I am. So why should I fear its being common knowledge?

Because someone might use it against me.

This is the issue we ought be focused on, not privacy. Why do we condone, if not actively substantiate, a society where such behavior is tolerated? A society in which these types of activities are not only allowed, but requisite and rewarded?

This is what concerns me, not the likely disturbing abstract of my personality that could be created from my Google search history. Surely any true friends of mine will grant me that minor indiscretion, and, in fact, already do.

This Election is Proof We No Longer Need a President

I have to admit, in the days following the election of Donald Trump to the office of President of the United States, I was depressed. Not that I was a supporter of Hillary Clinton, far from it — I waffled between casting my vote for Gary Johnson or Zoltan Istvan — but because I had always maintained great reverence for the position. See, I grew up in a time when being president meant something. The cast of my politics was forged upon the momentous statesmanship of Ronald Reagan, and my formative years were spent with the disgrace Richard Nixon brought upon the presidency still fresh in everyone’s memory. To this day, I have a 1968 vintage Presidents of the United States book set from American Heritage on my shelf.

No, what troubled me most about the fact that the electorate would even consider someone like Donald Trump, a mere personality, worthy of the greatest office on earth, let alone allow them to hold it, was the insult. The sanctity of the presidency was abolished with Trump’s election. His entry into the White House can only mean that we either subscribe to his primitive ideology, collectively, or we’re living in an idiocracy.

So considering neither of these to be acceptable, I was understandably shaken. Until I realized a third option. That the United States no longer has need for a president.

Now this is not to say that we don’t need a head of state, someone to serve as our chief public representative to the United Nations and other sovereign states. We do — though in that context Donald Trump is even less fit for the job. What it means, rather, is that we have finally realized our true capacity for self-governance. We no longer have need for a central authority.

To be sure, even the staunchest supporter of Donald Trump wouldn’t dream of ceding him power over their personal finances, let alone give him control over their lives. Their message wasn’t that they confer upon him any real confidence or defer to his judgement in any way. That wasn’t what they were trying to say in voting for him. No, the message America sent on Election Day 2016 was that they have no need for Washington D.C. whatsoever.

Personally, I am heartened by this realization, because, while being far from a globalist, I do see the world as a global community. Watching a clip on YouTube about the manned mission to Mars with my two young boys, I was emboldened by the knowledge that over a dozen countries are involved with the operation and maintenance of the International Space Station. With that level of cooperation in space, the likelihood of a terrestrial global military conflagration shrinks to near impossibility.

Indeed, it is only fitting that it was Hillary Clinton who placed the final nail in the presidential coffin, as it was her husband who cemented for Millennials an undermined confidence in the presidency in the first place. Nearly since birth, they have heard it disgraced, discredited, denounced, decried. The only holder of the office for whom they maintain any respect, Barack Obama, is more of a bro than an authority figure. He shares his playlists with them, Tweets, does interviews with Marc Maron and Vice. At least he can relate.

See the thing is, the generations of today don’t need a father figure telling them who they can date, or what they can spend their money on, or that they need to go to war anymore. Each generation since the Baby Boom has become more autonomous, more independent, more confident in their own capacity for self-determination. We don’t need a bunch of old white men, condescending coastal elites, or moneyed power brokers determining the future for us. We didn’t need Donald Trump, and we sure as hell don’t need Joe Biden.

In fact, we don’t need to be governed at all.

Don’t fret friends. We got this.

We Must Not Surrender the Blockchain

Blockchain is a technology with monumental potential.

Unfortunately it is falling prey to the same myopia that has hampered human progress since its beginning.

The overwhelming thing that blockchain provides is cohesion. For the first time in our history we can visualize our collective activity, as a species, in the same way as nature views us, and itself, as a unified, interdependent body.

From space, the earth is a single entity.

This perspective is what blockchain promises to be. That is, if we don’t allow our baser instincts to co-opt it.

I read an article in Outside Magazine years ago about CFCs. There was one passage that really struck me. In it, the author crossed the border to Metamoros, Mexico, following the trail of bootleg R-12. Use of the gas was illegal, but recharging old automotive A/C systems remained a thriving black market. At one point, the Mexican smuggler, who could not fathom why this was an issue, released some of the banned chemical into the air, saying “see, no problem.”

If you compartmentalize, then you can externalize. To the Mexican smuggler, right then and there, CFCs caused no harm, but we know that they cause ozone depletion, with global effects. For millennia, and still today, this is how human beings have interacted with the world. We consider the portion that concerns us, directly, and we disregard the rest.

It is exactly this tendency, and practice, that has lead to climate change, environmental degradation, species extinction, human exploitation.

In years past, we had an excuse, because we were literally incapable of comprehending relationships, and our place in them, that were beyond the immediate. But modern technology has changed all that. Now we have satellites that can image the entire globe, and a networked communication system connecting nearly everyone on earth.

Wikipedia is amazing, not because of any individual article, or even all of them together, but rather because they all are linked, just as they are in real life. Blockchain promises to bring limpidity, not only to the whole of human knowledge, but to all of human activity as well.

On the blockchain, pure transparency assures complete security.

No one can steal your identity, because it is immutable, fixed permanently in relation to that of your parents, and their parents before them. Once on chain, virtual reality ceases to exist. Instead, reality is virtualized.

Reality is. That we portray or imagine it to be different does not change it, so there is no reason to conceal it, unless it be nefarious. No one should fear placing the entirety of their existence on the blockchain, at least not for fear of others. On chain, the only thing one has to fear is one’s own self.

Imagine if there was a public distributed blockchain ledger during the Holocaust.

Would the world have stood idly by while the Nazis registered people at concentration camps and stockpiled poisonous gas? This is the level of transparency and degree of scrutiny that the blockchain is able to provide.

The purpose of the blockchain is not to build Dapps and make initial coin offerings. Its purpose isn’t to create more tools of inequity, division, and surveillance. It is to remove the shackles of preferentiality and injustice, to exorcise the power of dominion, to enable self-sovereignty, to make us each accountable to the unified global community of which we are, incontrovertibly, a part.

There Are No Private Blockchains in Nature

Reality is a distributed ledger.

When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we seem to have gotten ahead of ourselves. In the race to capture what we can of the stream of capital rushing into the space, we have failed to consider its greater implications, seeking to reconcile this radically new precedent to our current paradigm rather than enable it to realize its true potential.

It’s time to take a step back and come to grips with what this new technology really means for humanity.

Let’s start with the fundamentals.

The world is a finite place, easily transcribed by simple, albeit vast, math. There is only so much land, water, air, minerals, solar radiation, we could go on and on. We like to think of it as boundless, unfathomable, but it is not. It is limited and calculable.

This physical reality exists in a framework of space and time. In space, it can be organized and reorganized, moved hither and fro. In time, it moves linearly in one direction, as far as we can tell.

So does the blockchain.

It is frightening to think that there is only so much in the world to go around. Is there enough for me? It becomes daunting to consider, so we don’t. Instead, we assume it is infinite, and we devise schemes to try to obtain as much of it as possible for ourselves.

Fair enough. That is one way to go about it. And you could probably employ blockchain to help you accomplish that.

But that is not what blockchain is.

Blockchain is DNA.

Blockchain is a way to transcribe the composition and configuration of our known reality over time. Do with it as you like, at its most essential, that is what it is.

The question then becomes, who owns a map of the universe?

From the perspective of the purist, this question is again answered by the technology. Because it is decentralized, we each control our portion of that which makes up the whole. By the fact of our very existence, and our contribution to the collective same, we are all sovereign actors upon it. No greater authority conveys that legitimacy upon us, though many presume to do so. It exists a priori.

So if I am master of my own domain, assuming that to be a hash of my genetic sequence, my birth date, and my family tree, who is master of the commons?

Ah, there’s the rub.

Let us turn again to the fundamentals.

The commons, in our case the biosphere, exists, as does all that it contains. For these purposes, let’s separate those into two categories, life-seeking and non-life-seeking. Because we’re talking about humans, we’ll focus on the life-seeking.

Since the biosphere exists sans any predominance, each and every life-seeking entity has full right to the entirety of it. This gives rise to competition, which is the mode in which mankind has functioned up to this point.

Competition has created the framework of hierarchy, authority, legitimacy, and title that we understand to be the meta reality of today. Past competitions have set forth who controls the ledger and who does not. What gets written in it and what does not.

I suppose blockchain could be used to see this persist.

It would, however, be a poor use of its potential.

Even if we changed nothing else, placing the entirety of this record on the blockchain, and recording every transaction henceforth, would absolutely revolutionize the world. Gone would be the opportunity for duplicity, ambiguity, and manipulation, let alone the cost, associated with our current system of registry and transaction. In its place, transparency, self-sovereignty, and empowerment. 

This is the purpose of blockchain.

To progress the human enterprise from a reductive endeavor into a collaborative one. To shine a light into the dark areas where avarice has lived. To connect humanity through a single, common thread. To realize the ideal that is the world wide web.

Which, by the way, is how the world is actually organized in the first place.

The Human Race is Over

Bitcoin is dead, and has been ever since it was assigned a value relative to fiat currency, which has no inherent value beyond that as a medium of exchange. Really, Bitcoin was dead before that, because once all the coins are mined, how do you incentivize people to maintain the ledger, particularly when it becomes more resource intensive over time?

So what are we going to do with this knowledge? Sit back and wait for the crash?

The crash is not coming.

We cannot afford for it to, because the system is so complex that no one has any idea what is causal to what anymore. We’re simply protecting the downside, which is total implosion. The markets have been hacked by algorithms, so they can no longer be trusted. Big data is the new battlefront. Plan for infinite monetary growth, whether that is dollars or coin. Because it is meaningless.

This is the mentality already in employ in Russia and China. They care nothing about monetary policy, except in relation to USD. Within their own borders it is of no consequence — the state simply demands activity, initiates it, or creates money to motivate it as needed.

Hyperinflation is a chimera in this new reality, both because the total quantity of money is at once inconsequential and unable to be known, and because it leads to an impossible situation, which is the barter of goods at real value. It will never be allowed to happen, or more to the point, we should hope that it does.

The American Dream is defunct.

Now there is only hegemony. But rather than the dominance of one nation state over another, it is now a global dominion over each individual’s own state of being.

So what is to be done? Buy gold and guns and wait for the collapse? Certainly not, because that is never coming. Buy Bitcoin futures? To what end?

The value of Bitcoin was in its immutable nature, just as the value of stock was in minimizing the risk to any one person for a venture that many deemed necessary and important, just as the value of a bond was that it allowed a multitude to fund a common benefit that none alone could bring to fruition. Any derivative of this value is worthless, because it fails to provide any realizable motivation.

The trouble that the world faces today is that it fails to accept that we have moved beyond these primitive tools. In fact, a majority have forgotten that they are indeed tools, thinking them certainties. But they are not, able to be changed or abandoned altogether.

Thus we see Bitcoin reverted into something more familiar, rather than investigated for its potential as an entirely novel approach. People are buying it, but no one is employing it.

So what’s the point?

One point is that it is motivating the investment of our best intelligence into making it useful and deployable at scale. Blockchain based on proof of useful work will be one outcome — a distributed accounting of quantity, ownership, and allocation of everything known to man, secured by the need to collectively harness and effectively deploy the computing power of the world.

But again, to what end? Because the only thing that really matters is what we are doing, not the tools we are using to do it. Blockchain itself doesn’t contain value. The fact that it engenders trust without the need for a central authority does. The coins themselves don’t hold a thing, except perhaps the confidence in ourselves and others to achieve outcomes.

We have arrived at a point beyond scarcity, a circumstance for which none of our current systems are prepared. In an attempt to resolve this reality to our legacy construct, we are creating artificial scarcity. Bitcoin is an example of this. It is both scarce and consumptive by design. Stripped of any real value, at best all it can hope for is to reach its designed limit and inevitable demise.

What is required, more than any technology or organizational solution, is that we unshackle ourselves from the notion that there is anything left for us to fear.

America is no longer in competition with Russia or China, nor any other nation or people on Earth.

There is no difference between any of them. Every country in the world runs the same operating system. There are no Macs, and certainly no Linux. Bitcoin was Linux, until it became Red Hat.

Our goal, as a species, ist to ensure the well being of every single member therein, as well as the machinery and framework that serves to sustain them. It is with that in mind that we design the operating system, create the tools, and employ the same. The entirety of their value is found in what leverage they provide toward actually achieving that goal.

Before money, there was not this need to motivate a member of the tribe to act justly and contribute their full effort for the benefit of the group. That motivation came from the internal and external dynamic between the biological imperative toward personal survival and the beneficial network effect of broad collaboration. Those motivations have value, because they serve both the individual and the common good. Money is an abstraction of that value and, without the trust that it can engender similar motivation, utterly worthless.

Before blockchain, there was trust.

Bitcoin was an attempt to outsource trust to the cloud. As a tool for documenting the existence, title, and transfer of property by way of an interconnected, instantaneous, and transparent distributed ledger, it is beyond compare. In its current form, as an energy squandering substitute for an already outmoded construct, it is no better, and many ways worse, than money.

We do not live in the same world as before, and we cannot apply the same thinking, the systems of organization, motivation, production, and exchange. We have completely terraformed the Earth, forever altered its physical, chemical, and biological makeup. We have eliminated scarcity and constructed a global nervous system linking every human actor, and many non-human ones, into a single, gigantic brain. While people scramble to develop AI, they fail to recognize it is already in existence. Who knows what it is thinking?

It is time to free ourselves from the past and move boldly into our collective future.

We are all members of the same tribe, and accountable to one another. Give freely. The human race is over. We have emerged victorious.

Getting Back to Normal is the Last Thing We Need

When I think about the coronavirus pandemic, my mind often wanders to what I would be doing did it not exist. Going about my business. Continuing to be a cog in the machine. Perpetuating the status quo.

Is that what we want?

In our rush to get back to “normal”, are we perhaps overlooking the possibility that normal is precisely the problem?

Personally, I don’t want normal. I never have. And I certainly don’t want to get back to it.

Have you ever considered the impetus behind the massive appeal of the troves of aspirational media on the internet – photo blogs, Tumblr, Instagram? These microcosms of alternative reality – cosplay, virtual reality, van life, nostalgia. Could the source of their allure be because we find the real world, the one we have literally constructed around us, completely unfulfilling?

Ever since we ceased having to constantly struggle to merely survive, there has existed the opportunity to create, with intention, a built environment that doesn’t only meet our basest needs, but actually serves to evoke within us positive emotions – inspiration, creativity, courage, joy.

I have long considered what might result from the following experiment: ask everyone to render, in whatever medium they chose, their ideal landscape. The image they see when they look out their window, gaze upon their home or neighborhood, walk out their front door.

I suspect the vast majority of them would appear strikingly similar.

In my mind, there exists an image of a perfect world. I often think about what keeps me from realizing it.

When I watch scenes on the news or video clips captured on smartphones on the internet, I am struck by how unnatural and uninspiring the settings I see featured in them appear to me. Gray. Monochrome. Uniform. Concrete.

Contrast this with the image that we imagined above. Or any image from your favorite influencer or visual artist on Instagram. 

Do the two images evoke similar emotions in you? I doubt it. 

So why not? And, more importantly, what can we do about it?

The coronavirus has brought the “all stop” to the economic juggernaut that my wife and climate scientist Dr. Steven Running told me was utterly impossible and potentially disastrous. With that achieved, getting “back to normal” is the very last thing I want to do.

Gitmo

Some time ago, I was contacted by Montana Senator Steve Daines with an email entitled “Keep Guantanamo Open”. I was so appalled by the worldview presented in this letter that I felt compelled to share some thoughts and clearly communicate my position on the matter of Guantanamo Bay in particular and national security in general.

Ethics, honor, and human decency demand that we close this facility immediately and return those detained therein to their respective nations, for trial there, if their countries deem it appropriate, or for extradition to the United States if they face criminal charges in this country, as provided by international law.

Furthermore, while I have your ear, please allow me the opportunity to clear up a misunderstanding in regards to some “values” Senator Daines and others have ascribed to me and purportedly uphold.

I, for one, do not spend my life in fear of any nation or ideology on earth, and therefore do not need to be made secure from them. To echo Eisenhower, the advent of the nuclear option ensures there can never again be a conflict of any scale on this planet, and these wasted efforts on the part of Senator Daines and others in the maintenance of a military state are rooted in a worldview that has long since passed being relevant.

To illustrate my point, let us consider for a moment the world that such people imagine and contrast it with reality. Where again do they find this overt military threat? It simply does not exist. At best there is a cultural threat, a poli-economic threat, but there is no military threat, and, I would argue, no real threat at all. No power in the world today is going to march against another, intent on commandeering the rest by force. Such talk is preposterous.

Let us take our thought experiment even further. What if the United States was to abandon its military position completely? What is the worst that would happen? Every country on earth aspires to emulate our success. Are they going to attack us? Enslave us? We buy their goods, we innovate advances that improve their lives, we are a model of freedom for the world. What nation is going to march against and supplant us?

Who could? So what if they did? Is there something so different about Chinese or Russian life that would fundamentally change how we live? Are there people in the developed world who actually believe there are sovereign nations bent on foreign conquest? To even ask the question is to appear ridiculous.

Imagine now the alternative. What if we were to eliminate all borders and allow people to freely move about the earth? What if we were to train every single person in their own defense and limit the use of military force to the protection of human and legal rights? What if we were to work in concert rather than discord? How would such a world differ from that of today?

To move forward, we must accept that, ultimately, the peoples of the earth will live in peaceful coexistence. This is an absolute inevitability. The sooner we can align ourselves with this reality, the better off we all shall be. 

In doing so, we must become open and accepting of other modes of living and realize that violence alone is our enemy. We can no more expect the other peoples of the world to bend to our will than we should bend to theirs. Surely there may be conflict and resolution as competing forms of poli-social-economic systems vie for primacy, but there need not be violence. Violence assumes resistance, and nature does not allow resistance to prevail. It is, in fact, futile. It will be overcome.

Recently I posed this question to a dear friend: “How do we move from where we are today to Star Trek?” I was disappointed by his response.

“How do we get there? Through competition. Nations competing against each other to be the first to gain advantage.”

That doesn’t sound like something Captain Kirk or Picard would say. It sounds more like the type of rhetoric I would expect to hear from Hitler, or perhaps Steve Daines.

Addendum:

The United States has occupied Guantanamo Bay Naval Base continuously since 1898. If that doesn’t put the artifice of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis into perspective, I don’t know what will.

A reasonable argument for competition from Robin Hanson – Long Views Are Competitive. However, I still believe what makes humans unique is inscribed in our ability to act contrary to our interests, and our further evolution contingent upon transcending this apparent need for competition.

Unified Theory

Like any true philosopher, my goal is a unifying theory.

Currently, I have only disparate thoughts. This website is an effort toward assembling them in a place accessible to others.

Generally, I believe the universe is itself the unifying theory. As far as I can tell, the universe, meaning “all that there is,” experiences itself as consciousness, and the two are mutually exclusive. The universe can be universal, or it can be conscious, but not both at the same time. Beyond that, most things seem up for grabs.

There are a number of delightfully interesting threads worth exploring. I’ll add more as I come to them, but here are a few to start:

  • Being* – what does it mean to be, particularly without consciousness
  • Language* – does anything precede it

*an acknowledgement to Dr. Robert Walsh for leading me to these investigations