TECH & SOCIETY
Towards Freedom: A Guide To The Bigger Picture — Part 3
A short series on how blockchain will improve our lives by increasing our freedom.
Humans are complex beings. Far from being monolithic, they are composed of multiple identities. One can be at the same time a lawyer, a mother, a wife, an aspirational painter, a loving daughter (or its masculine pendant). These identities interact, sometimes they collide and enter in conflict with one another. I can be an ecologist that wants to save the planet while at the same time aspiring to travel.
These collisions are also visible in the world of blockchain. Many actors are at the same time crypto enthusiasts, digital citizens, coders, investors. Each of these facets become more or less important throughout time, and are being pushed up or down by the other, like in a wax lamp.
Different identities can cause friction because they operate on different timeframes. Our long-term beliefs can conflict with our inner investor’s desire for short-term gains. If we’re feeling upset because prices are not moving as fast as we want, we should listen to the enthusiast or crypto citizen within us and step back to see the bigger picture. To use a famous metaphor, we should look at the moon and not the finger pointing at it. In this short series, we look at three ways through which blockchain will improve our lives by increasing our freedom. After exploring social and potential freedom, we’re now diving into psychological freedom.
Psychological freedom, think bigger
According to Christian Bay (1921–1990), there are three types of freedom: social freedom, potential freedom and psychological freedom. In the “metaphor of the prison”, the Canadian political scientist illustrates the different ways to lose them. Today we explore psychological freedom that he defines as the “degree of harmony between basic motives and overt behavior” (p.83). Bay describes it as a set of internal (mental, psychological, cultural) restrictions.
After social freedom, a second way through which citizens are denied agency is by reducing the will itself to escape the prison. I have a low psychological freedom if the door of the prison is open but I don’t dare going out. In the first episode of Matrix, Cypher refuses to stay in the real world and prefers instead to remain ignorant and to eat a juicy steak that is just a line of code instead of “being outside”. Also, in the series Severance, the innies of Mark S and his colleagues are, at the beginning, happy not to know what happens “out there”. These are examples of lack of psychological freedom, in which individuals prefer a golden cage rather than a potentially disturbing truth out there.
If there are certain things in life I desire but I am lacking the guts to seize them, these are examples of a lack of psychological freedom. This is what Foucault wrote in his famous book Surveiller et punir (“Discipline and punish”). The bureaucratic institutions of society take away people’s will by making them feel overwhelmed, by making them feel that things are “beyond their control”. This is largely due to the fact that it is very hard for anyone in a complex society to link one’s action to the impact he or she has on the society. Due to eco-anxiety, some people feel empowered to fight whereas others feel their horizon is shrinking due to climate warming.
Also social norms are powerful drivers to increase or decrease our agency. Would you be an artist when you come from a family of business people or engineers? Data show that probably not. Would you accept your creative sexuality in a conservative family? Freud has shown that you will try not to, which will cause neuroticism. Remember that social norms are so powerful that many “innocent” participants of the famous prison experiment sent prisoners to death when they were asked to by a superior!
This also happens frequently in sport, in which objectively stronger teams or individuals lose to others considered weaker due to some form of psychological unfreedom. Even when odds were against him, Mohamed Ali was famous for getting under people’s skin and reversing the balance of power, as with Sonny Liston (1964) or George Foreman (1974). Words can be powerful to increase or decrease people’s psychological freedom. Complexity, social norms and lack of vision are some of the things through which our psychological freedom is reduced. Most of the time, individuals don’t realize it or don’t know why this happens, as in Strangers Things where the inverted world is the reason why individuals lose freedom.
In Stranger Things’ Upside Down, there is an alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human world, trying to eventually overtake that human world. The humans (the heroes of the series) discover how this organism interacts as a hive and they find a way in as well as a way out of the alternate reality. This gives the heroes freedom and power: they change the nature of everyday interactions to fight the evil in The Upside Down, in both worlds at the same time.
Again, because there is a way in, there might be a way out. Psychological freedom can be increased with people acting on their everyday life. That’s where Blockchain has a role to play. People can regain a sense of power by acting directly with one another on simple transactions through smart contracts (money transfer, communication, publishing). By changing the nature of interactions today, the adoption of blockchain-based processes could lead to a wider and more distributed feeling of agency tomorrow. Whether this will be enough to counter mere capitalistic forces that produce, code and decode desires is another question. But there are several routes through which blockchain could influence the feeling of agency and psychological freedom.
Maybe the most obvious is that some DAOs can help decentralize financial exchanges, bringing back the feeling of contributing to the daily basic actions. Unlike centralized exchange (CEX) platforms such as Kraken or Binance that operate in many ways as classic financial intermediaries with digital assets and that are prone to risks, there are some platforms such as Uniswap or Sushiswap that enable decentralized exchanges (DEX). These platforms act as a protocol of exchanges of tokens based on Ethereum which uses pools of liquidities (instead of order books) to ensure faster and cheaper transactions. Because tokens do not need to be on the exchange platform, these platforms are usually considered safer. Maybe more importantly, platforms such as Uniswap rely on open source code, which means that users have more control and visibility on the rules of the game.
Some DAOs can also expand way beyond DEFI. Some make it possible to take a stance on major conflicts. Examples such as UkraineDAO make it possible to send money to the Ukrainian army, bypassing the national choices of a given government or of a heavy and expensive non profit organization to send money. I am no longer just a citizen undergoing the choice of my government, I am also able to lean on geopolitical forces at my own scale. Fighting a dictator at the other side of the world… How empowering is that?
In the same way the use of traditional, hierarchical processes lead to a culture of verticality and submission, the use of horizontal processes will lead to a culture and empowerment. Blockchain has a role to play to increase psychological freedom.
About Cartesi
The Blockchain OS is a decentralized layer-2 infrastructure that supports Linux and mainstream software components. For the first time, developers can code scalable smart contracts with rich software tools, libraries, and the services they’re used to, bridging the gap between mainstream software and blockchain.
Cartesi is enabling millions of new startups and their developers to use The Blockchain OS and bring Linux applications on board. With a groundbreaking virtual machine, optimistic rollups, and side-chains, Cartesi paves the way for developers of all kinds, to build the next generation of blockchain apps.
Welcome to The Blockchain OS, home to what’s next.
Read more:
Christian Bay. (1958). The Structure of Freedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Michel Foucault. Discipline and punish (1977). New York: Pantheon Books.
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