Great Flood and Cyberspace
Tell me about your home world, Usul
Русскую версию можно прочитать здесь.
Like a sleeping deity from the ancient texts of Hindustan — Vishnu, resting on the Causal Ocean, the modern world rests on the waters of the vast ocean of information. And like the Great Flood from biblical legends, this abyss can destroy our world, blurring the borders between reality and sleep, truth and falsehood, past and future.
This ocean was inevitably growing from the very beginning when, thousands of years ago, a man tamed sounds and started to speak — this is how the first programming language of reality appeared. I’m talking specifically about programming, since wording (or literature), as a method of encoding and transmitting information, allows us to convey to others our vision of the world and its development — to create an algorithm for moving from the present to the future. And it is precisely the collision of two visions that spawns a conflict of two points of view on such a movement, discussion, changes and development. And as the results of such a movement we have: new information, new vision, new conflict and new development.
When information ceased to fit into our everyday memory, we began to grow through the development of additional methods for its storage. So, the first ways of memorizing are improved with the advent of rhyme and poetry, through the rhythm, music appears and an epic is born, which reveals to us the canvas of the past through writings. It is noteworthy that in some cultures this canvas flourishes for trillions of years (if you are not familiar with the Indian Puranas, you should pay attention to this phenomenon — author’s comment). With the advent of writing, the inflation of the text begins, slow and imperceptible, through the copying “by hand”, in closed priesthood communities — the sacred scriptures! Sensitive guards are standing in front of the entrance to these first temples of information, the doors are tightly closed and only open to the elite: seals, locks, passwords, secret signs and alphabets. But here comes the first Prometheus and steals the fire of knowledge, the water of life overflows the Holy Grail. The seal cracks and the door of the temple opens. Cycle by cycle, the thread of inflation rolls faster and faster, leaving Ariadne’s string inside centuries: religion begins to transform into law, regulations arise outside of sacred texts, printing technology comes in and legends arise outside of myths about gods and heroes, books lose their sacred halo and the era of mass media begins, publishers and means of distribution multiply.
Man comprehends the physical nature of reality, plunging into the depths, until he reaches the world of electrons. And here it is — the great limit of Tai Chi, the simplicity and genius of the binary code, the electrification of the text, the last key to the last door, and behind it — the Ocean of Cyberspace.
The first charm is overshadowed by new waves of inflation, but on a hitherto unprecedented scale and quality, in all directions. We are drowning in information. And if earlier the verity of information from the sacred text was undeniable, firmly fixed in stone in the literal and figurative sense, then now in the modern world the truth of information from the Ocean of Cyberspace is always in doubt, always in movement and metamorphosis, not to mention the fact that it does not lend itself to comprehension in its entirety, does not fit into one’s head. Its flows can no longer be controlled or assessed by old methods, nor by any particular person, nor by any group of persons up to government bodies. This never happened in a known history. And if we will not harness this flood, it will never happen again. Amazing time!
In such historical perspective and precisely in this critical moment the technology of distributed ledger appears, which attracts us with a promise of stability through the emergence of tools to keep information unchanged. And it is this technology that gives us new ways to exist in this vast Ocean — programming methods on distributed ledgers, smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO).
Maybe it is DAO — like the Isaac Asimov’s Foundation — which will keep us from the oblivion sleep and allow us not only to preserve the knowledge, culture and achievements of science, protect them from distortion and lies, but also will become the basis for the new programmable economy. And maybe this will help the mankind finally to grow up, to abandon predatory philosophy and get the tools and momentum for creativity and further development.
In what legal environment will these methods exist? Can they fit into the old framework of a plain text that has depreciated due to millennia-old inflation? Is there someone to hold them within the old legislative procedures under the supervision of a scarecrow of the modern parliamentarism, which turned out to be as that king — naked? The old world is like sand flowing through your fingers, settling to the bottom of the new Ocean. What will Mare Liberum look like and will it be at all?
“In the beginning was the Word,” the scriptures tell us. “There is nothing outside the text,” one of the famous philosophers of our time, Jacques Derrida, repeats. And we echo: “Law is code.”
Ex machina
