Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions---things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis---while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
What are the alternatives though? Currently much of the scaling of organizations hit the issues of Dunbar's number results in big (and exclusive) clubs, cat herding, and Kafka problems.
The value points I see are: codifying bueracracies into actionable contracts prevents the current problem where rules and doctrines are written but selectively enforced as a personal choice. I don't disagree on the need to explictlt account for failures to predict all outcome of a rule though, but I would rather be something fixed upstream then selectively prescribed.
A root of trust built on a transparent system using a mathematical proof as the underpinning to explicitly state and enforce the structure of power.
I don't disagree on the difficulty part though
Federation of smaller groups? Rojava is a living experiment in that way of organization.
Bottom-up decentralized power does not require management if people are allowed to self-manage. Combined with some form of cybernetics (cybersyn style), an organization could likely scale pretty effectively.
Isn't all of that just things happening on a computer, though? It still has to translate to meat space, and there, you can still ultimately selectively enforce things. The blockchain won't stop social clicks from forming.
Unless everyone becomes educated enough to fully understand the implications and inner workings of how all that operates, how would they be able to trust what the blockchain says if it involved controversial things, or things of significant weight? They would either all need to be programmers to understand what the code is doing, or personally know a programmer they trust to verify the code is legit and actually doing what they collectively agreed upon.
I mean in general smaller groups and bottom up organization seem like the moves but I imagine this tool being specifically part of a cybernetic type system like cybersyn was imagined. The guy I mentioned actually introduced me to project cybersyn first and I watched the video not long after wanting more details on the subject.
What I mean on actionable could be the configuration of the IT systems that mediate decisions between memebrs. If a jury system is supposed to be in place then the DAO could orginize the digital apparatus for deliberating votes, apply penalties for failures to appear, hold the configuration for the agree apon forms and inputs, etc etc
All of that today is done by people interpreting regulations and codes and implementing thus enforcing themselves.
That is true of any system, but a system with roots in mathematical certainty, when given enough understanding, lead to the same understanding. That just can't be said of other systems. The fact that people may rely on experts for complex systems seems inevitable (lawyers for example are that for our current political systems, union reps for the union, the coop evangelist for that system, etc, etc).
The part where you said "people interpreting regulations and codes" is really, really important, and I don't think you quite understand why. This is where the advocates of DAOs and smart contracts constantly trip up; they think that the interpretation of law is a failure, and not a feature.
This is exactly why we don't allow police officers to judge guilt and assign sentences. It's why we have an adversarial court system; because no law can ever perfectly encapsulate all of its own implications. Laws will, inevitably, need to be interpreted at some point in time, because sooner or later you will encounter a scenario that could not possibly have been envisioned when the law was written.
This is why you cannot programmatically enforce regulations and contracts. There must be room for interpretation for any community or society to be able to act in a manner that is truly equitable and just, because - inevitably - most often the least imagined scenarios will involve the most marginalized members of that community.
I mean we don't disagree on the idea that we need flexibility and the ability to allow for remidiation even in the face of uncertainty.
Its just that I think that where we can be certain we should be. If we can be certain that we want officials that are accountable to the people, we should be.
There is tremendous value in this beyond what is made possible by DAOs. For example many people prefer the set price system set by stores both owners and customers as compared to haggling and bartering for every exchange.
The adversial court system, I personally think, is a great institution but it is very expensive to operate in so the default is too avoid using as much as possible. Its good to have if you need it, and we as a society do need it, but most administrivia doesn't and shouldn't be done there.