Jordan Hall
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

Whew! These are both deep points.

Yes, unfortunately I wasn’t able to include market mechanisms in this piece and to be sure every form of civilization has fundamentally required p2p meshworks of trade and contract to manage enormous amounts of complexity. This has its own history (e.g., the invention of informal law, the invention of formal law, single entry accounting, double entry accounting, money and debt, etc.).

Even more deeply — agreed that exponential change in technology seems very likely to outstrip at least any version of p2p meshwork collective intelligence that we currently have access to. To my mind, this shows up as “open loops” where either because of pace (things happen too quickly to be tracked and closed), novelty (new kinds of relationships and effects emerge too quickly to be closed) and magnitude (more and more people have more and more power to effect more and more of the world). The Blue Church founders on these and, so far as I can tell, so do all existing versions of p2p meshwork CI’s.

Then the last — Neal Stephenson coined the term Amistics. “the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish people … All cultures did this, frequently without being consciously aware that they had made collective choices.”

Here we run into two different but related problems:

  1. We don’t have anything close to a robust science of Amistics. We have no idea how even a relatively lightweight technology like moving from slide rule to calculator will cascade into the internal (psychology, mind) and the external (sociological) environment.
  2. Win/Lose competition between cultures — even if the Amish guessed rightly about what to include in their culture, they have catastrophically limited their ability to compete with the larger American culture surrounding them. Whether this shows up as Cook in Tahiti or a transhuminist splinter group leaping into the singularity at the expense of everyone else, it is a . . . hard problem.

Great!

    Jordan Hall

    Written by

    Changed my name back to Hall, sorry for the confusion. Also, if you are interested, my video channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMzT-mdCqoyEv_-YZVtE7MQ