He was a founding voice in one of the truly original branches of thought that found expression on the internet, left-accelerationism, as well as a pioneering figure in the blogosphere.
This intellectual journey convinced me that philosophy of computer science isn’t a niche subfield, but a lens through which the others need to be understood.
But my job is to see if they’re guided by the right abstract questions about money and similar social institutions, and to tentatively suggest some better ones.
But there’s an understandable tendency to overestimate how compatible they are, and the resulting hype can push the ecosystem in questionable directions.
The obvious example here is NFTs , which are really interesting from a technological perspective, but are caught up in exactly the wrong sort of excitement.
People often say that money does three jobs: a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account.
This is predicated on the belief that at some point it’ll become stable enough relative to other assets to function as a unit of account.
It gives you access to a certain share of the output of the whole system of production, a share you earn by having a stake in that system.
In liberal, democratic states, political control and economic activity are nominally separate, but your stake in the system as a whole gets you a non-transferable token you can spend in elections to rebalance its overhead .
But it’s clear to me that any improved social contract, liberal or post-liberal, will need to rethink the relationship between currency, geography and accounting.
The banking ecosystem is responsible for securing value in the physical and social infrastructure that lets us live our lives.
At the end of the day, money is power, and power has a nasty tendency to ratchet itself unless it’s checked in some way.
Though cryptography and software verification can seriously narrow down the range of possible attack vectors on your assets, they can’t eliminate them entirely.
But the two types of excitement I talked about earlier are going to increasingly pull apart, and this is going to feed into a much wider debate about cypher-politics.
I think what may be missing is a model of government that, rather than protecting your privacy by monopolizing your data, protects your privacy by providing the tools and infrastructure for you to do so yourself .
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