foreign
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it's kind of complicated to introduce
myself so you can go to my
website I'm basically a blogger and a
couple of other things
and I promise you this is the only meme
I'll throw at you
ah
so I do write a blog a newsletter and so
on
and this is going to be a pretty
abstract talk at a fairly high level but
I do have like at least some experience
dabbling at a very Hands-On beginner
level so I'm coming from somewhere as in
it's not up in the cloud so if you're
interested I did a long thread last year
about my initial explorations of web3
stuff
okay so the title of my talk there are
many Alternatives it's a reference to
Margaret Thatcher's famous line there is
no alternative she popularized it I
think starting in 1980 and it became the
catchphrase of neoliberalism and the
basic idea was that as communism was
beginning to get discredited there was
increasingly no alternative to the idea
of Western liberal Democratic ways of
running countries with free markets and
the institutions that came with it and
it became sort of the core of what
became known as the Washington consensus
so so those of you who need the Short
History lesson this was a consensus
before blockchain type consensuses and
this was the set of practices that the
World Bank and IMF used to sort of
dictate to countries how they should run
their economies and this was around 1989
and as the
Cold War ended
the thesis became more than an economic
thesis and it leveled up into a sort of
philosophical historical thesis and one
of the things that really helped this
along was this book that came out in 91
called the end of history and the last
man and it's widely misunderstood but it
became sort of a justification for the
idea that there is no alternative to the
one way to run the world
and of course as many of you remember a
lot of people were very unhappy with the
idea of there is a one single Playbook
of how to run the world and I think of
them as all teeners as in they don't
really want a pluralist world with many
systems competing on how to run it but
they want to be the default alternative
they want to be the way to run the world
to which there is no alternative and
some of them
kind of like lost to history now but
some of you may remember the
anti-globalization protests and the
world social Forum that came up in the
late 90s Islamic Terror was another sort
of alternate way of running the world in
in the making uh what we now think of as
Sovereign individualism type
libertarianism the original book
actually came out in the late 90s before
uh blockchain stuff and of course the
Chinese model and deng's model of
running an alternate to the Western
model came up around them so I Define
Athena or there is no alternative Theory
as a kind of Maxi thesis it's the idea
that one winner take all convergent
future will dominate the rest of history
and again is Bruno Mars In This Crowd so
you should attend his talk since he's
written a book called the history
history's beginning and I'm sure he has
more to say about it but I think a lot
of the use of fukuyama's ideas in the
sort of there is no alternative kind of
tier Rising is is basically wrong
but okay
let's start the story for this talk with
Bitcoin and I think of Bitcoin as the
alt libertarian Tina Playbook with extra
steps
so I don't have much more to say about
Bitcoin
but ethereum I think is not a Tina
Theory right
it seems to enable many Divergent
stories even within itself and in its
relationships to other things right so
within the ethereum universe you've got
artists with their nfts you've got defy
degens like going for yield farming and
these are very very different types of
people they're not like you know when
you talk to bitcoin Maxis you expect
them to be eating beef reading the same
books and start spouting the same
ideology when you talk to ethereum
people if you picked one at random you
have no idea what you'll get you could
get like a far left person into art you
could get a far right person who's kind
of like indistinguishable from
bitcoiners so that's what you get with
ethereum and it seems to coexist well
with things outside ethereum as well
like you know the traditional legal
system it has ways of like
interoperating with them and so forth
okay let's give that property a name I'm
going to call it hyper complexity it's
the property of a system that allows it
to sustain many mutually in commensurate
Divergent narrative Futures at the same
time I wanted to read it out at least
once and by mutually in commensurate
that's kind of a quasi-mathematical way
of saying it but it means you cannot
judge one story by another story you
cannot judge whether a lot of the Rings
is a good story based on whether you
like Harry Potter or not because they
have different Aesthetics they have
different narrative Logics right
so why hyper instead of you know all the
other prefixes and I think that's what
the note lots of other things call
themselves hyper all are interesting to
look into Timothy Martin's hyper objects
climate change is an example Adam
Curtis's hyper normalization is sort of
the opposite of what I'm talking about
right now uh Nick Clan from the far
right he has this notion of a
hyperstition which is
um it's kind of like a self-loaffling
prophecy of a superstition
computer science has an idea of a
hypervisor and I'm an aerospace engineer
and I like things that slice faster than
Mark's life so that's Hypersonic but the
reference I'm most sort of uh inspired
by is the idea of hyperbolic geometry
so here's the mnemonic image for those
of you who don't know what it is regular
geometry which you learned in high
school happens on a plane if you have a
line and you pick a point outside it
there's only one line you can draw draw
through it that's euclidean geometry and
non-euclidean geometries mess with the
parallel postulate and you get two basic
versions so if you have space time
that's positively curved like the sphere
on the top you get a situation where
there are no possible parallel lines so
the equivalent of a straight line in a
sphere is a great circle and if you pick
a point outside the great circle and try
to draw another great circle that does
not intersect the first one it's not
possible so I like to think of that as a
motif for there is no alternative
whereas hyperbolic geometry on
negatively curved spaces if you have a
straight line and then you pick a point
outside it you can draw an infinite
number of other straight lines through
it so think of this as The Motif for
hyper complexity here
okay so why is hyper complexity
important and I claim that hyper
complexity allows open-ended evolution
and it is the sort of substance of
civilizational advances
whereas the opposite which is there is
no alternative single monolithic States
approaching Perfection are a sign of
evolutionary dead ends or bottlenecks
and my hypothesis is that history
evolves when smooth Tina periods kind of
trigger discontinuous hyper complexity
leaps it's similar to the idea of
punctuated equilibrium biology
okay some justification since it's kind
of like a wild big claim so this is from
Parkinson's law uh management classic
and there's a lot of evidence for the
idea that um you know when a system
approaches Perfection it's at the point
of collapse Perfection is finality
Perfection is death so system
approaching that state is about to
collapse and die
I hope you can see some connections to
things that were said earlier in the
morning
and Tim had to slide up yesterday
and yeah it made me grit my teeth
because it makes my talk a little harder
and I just took this picture in the
morning with Danny stock and I thought
the headline was perfect perfect with
them a finality and maybe Perfection and
collapse and death I hope not
okay
let's see if we can find a way out of
that so I love this definition of um
civilizational advances by the
philosopher Whitehead
civilization advances by extending the
number of important operations which we
can perform without thinking about them
so basically the idea is civilization is
a series of automations of important
things
okay so maybe protocol Perfection can
also be a foundation for an ecosystem
hyper-complexity leak so that's sort of
the wild speculative hypothesis here
yeah so a major category of important
operations is basically dealing with
conflict amongst mutually Divergent
narratives right many stories are being
told how do you actually deal with
conflict
an example is religions that compete for
believers and promise different
afterlives right and for thousands of
years we did not actually have a good
way of dealing with this
and freedom of religion you can think of
it as a whitehead advance that automates
this particular important operation and
in this conference of like 3000 people
uh some subset of you are in this room
I'm sure that many religions and many
levels of sincerity and religious belief
are represented and there's a lot of
atheists but fundamentally we sort of
figured out about 300 400 years ago what
it takes for multiple religions to live
in the same area without killing each
other right so we've replaced religious
wars with a kind of pluralist piece an
example a list of examples of Whitehead
advances so I've compiled this from a
bunch of sources you can see that at the
bottom the first three are from
fukuyama's other book really good I
strongly recommended if you're
interested in these topics the origins
of political order
the first three are civilizational leaps
that really allowed more and more
Divergent stories to live in the same
region or Nation or country right
strong centralized State rule of law
which is a very different idea than rule
by law if they're just laws that's not
enough you need everybody to be under
the law some people cannot be above the
law so that's rule of law and China even
though it innovated a strong Central
State it did not develop and still has
not developed rule off law it has ruled
by law and that developed in Egypt India
and later on through Europe then
accountable government forgiveness is an
idea Hannah Arendt points out is kind of
a novel Innovation that came out of
Christianity that took us from a regime
of like Vendetta filled stories of like
you know killing each other in
tit-for-tat stories to much more plural
stories where maybe you didn't have to
kill each other maybe forgiveness and
they're moving forward is a way
separation of religion and state this is
a fairly recent idea Spinoza in the
1670s actually had to kind of invent the
idea and States had to kind of be
developed on the basis of that
modern markets I strongly suggest you
read Brad delong's new book that just
came out slouching towards Utopia and of
course what we're talking about here I
think crypto is actually one such
civilizational Advance or leap and I
think there's another big contender in
the world today which is machine
learning and it's kind of interesting
that we have these two things and I was
tweeting a while ago that maybe crypto
is the first foundation and machine
learning is the second Foundation like
you know in asimov's Psycho history
okay so let's put all these things
together what's the connection between
complexity hyper complexity ossification
civilizational advances lots of big wig
terms let's start with complexity and
there's like lots and lots of different
ways to think about complexity I'm not
going to be talking about all of these
but happy to like sidebar with anybody
who's interested I could talk for an
hour on each of these
all are the technical ways these are all
technical ways there are social and
Humanities ways of thinking about
complexity but I'll go with technical
um
and the one I want to like highlight for
understanding our topic is one known as
skinifin it's pronounced skinnifin it's
a Scottish word it looks like sinophen
but it's skinfen and it was developed by
this guy Dave Snowden
and this is the picture it thinks of
systems in the um within this framework
of four regimes of clear complicated
complex and chaotic and they're each
described by
pattern of constraints and a pattern of
how to operate effectively within them
so if you work backwards from chaotic
chaotic systems lack of constraint and
the bits and pieces are highly decoupled
which means you have like stories that
can evolve that are like disconnected
and mutually in commensurate like I said
and the best way to act within them is
kind of adventurously so you know act
sense respond that's the phrase they use
which is kind of like living dangerously
you could die
once you get to complex regimes you have
slightly Loosely coupled systems so it's
no longer decoupled and you have a more
experimental regime where you can do
like you know trial and error and it
won't always kill you and there's a
opportunity to learn and evolve without
killing yourself then you get to
complicate it where constraints start to
get tightly coupled and you're in a
sense analyze respond regime where
think of it as you have to look at a
situation model it analyze it you know
with spreadsheets and equations and
everything and chances are if you think
clearly and do it well it actually won't
require much trial and error or you know
killing yourself and finally clear it's
a completely constrained system there
are no degrees of freedom there is no
alternative and all you can do is look
at reality sense it categorize it and
respond you're almost an automaton
you're a bot okay let's map this to
everything we've talked about so far so
the Whitehead definition of civilization
I think maps to the path from chaotic to
clear right you have a chaotic system
you add a little bit more thinking and
advancing and it becomes a complex
system where it's still hard to manage
then it becomes a complicated system and
then finally it becomes a clear system
where it's been fully automated and you
don't have to think about it anymore and
the right half of that kind of two by
two is the there is no alternative
regime right complicated plus clear
that's what things that there are no
alternative to look like if you look at
the neoliberal world order and the
Washington consensus World bank's
Playbook imf's Playbook that looks like
the part on the right there is no
alternative it's a complicated and in
some places clear thing
and of course if you want to add the
idea that towards Perfection you get
collapsed
have a leap a red leap from clear to
chaotic where a system approaches
perfection
acquires fragility collapses and then
you're back in chaos all right so this
is how I think of hyper complexity this
is the picture on which it evolves so
the question is can we eliminate crisis
Pathways in this whole process of
evolving hyper complexity can we have
smoothly increasing hyper complexity
without these you know there is no
alternative bottlenecks and my belief is
no you cannot
maybe you guys think differently but
but can we at least reshape crisis
Pathways so I went from Green but not
quite red so an orange pathway I think
of this as equivalent to the question
can you do the equivalent of asimovian
psycho history
and my belief is
yeah maybe you can do it
this is sort of a very janky work in
progress definition but the idea is if
you respond to a looming crisis by
tweaking the system at an axiomatic
level somehow maybe the big crisis
becomes a small crisis or even a no
crisis and maybe because of that you
benefit by getting a period where hyper
complexity can grow right and examples
are Y2K a crisis that turned out not to
be the Montreal protocol for ozone that
worked pretty well
sort of like backsliding now and ozone
is back as a problem some types of
corporate self-disruptions seem to work
like Netflix moving from you know DVDs
to streaming the merge I think I would
still put a question mark on it has it
actually hit the category of um this
definition same with a lot of things
happening in say climate change like
Renewables or carbon capture
and note that this is not resilience or
accelerationism which are two other ways
of thinking about this problem
resilience is you make yourself Tough
Enough and redundant enough that you can
sort of power through the crisis and
come out maybe a little broken and
battered but you're still alive that's
resilience
accelerationism is you believe that the
system today is so corrupt it deserves
to die and you floor the accelerator and
burst through the crisis and you come
out the other side maybe you know
superhuman and a lot of the
accelerationists it started as a
right-wing philosophy now there's a left
accelerationism as well but this is
neither resilience nor accelerationism
this is what I think of as exactation so
you know adapting to something kind of
before it happens so this is where I
think it maps to this is another slight
stolen from Tim yesterday so we had a
candidate hyper-complexity leap starting
and before ossification maybe we will
enjoy a period of hyper complexity
growth and that's a pretty blurry
picture but that's about as blurry as my
understanding so I'm fine with that how
do you design for this process of like
you know hopefully reshaped hyper
complexity evolution
so in search of design principles
you can think of like the spirit of the
design principles first so first thing I
want to do is infer what I hyper
complexity is like from historical
examples not theories so the list of
examples I looked at before you know
like development of the state the
emergence of Christianity things like
that
it's not the original Tina Playbook of
neoliberalism it's not the Silicon
Valley Playbook some of you may
recognize the phrase breaking smart I
wrote a set of essays while working with
Andresen Horowitz about seven years ago
and that's the Silicon Valley Playbook I
sincerely believe what we're entering
now is no longer the Silicon Valley
Playbook
uh and of course um
what all the other alternate playbooks
the Socialist one the libertarian one I
think they're all kind of like not
candidates here
so right now I'm just thinking through
the phenomenology that I think is
important in hyper complexity it needs
theorizing and I added those last two
points as I was listening this morning I
love the idea of subtraction over
addition and a surprise to hear so many
mentions of infinite game over finite
game I'm really pleased to hear that
because James cars is one of my favorite
authors and I had the Good Fortune to uh
be in a salon where he spoke a few weeks
before he died so one of the last
opportunities to hear him and one of the
interesting things was I had assumed he
would be kind of this very spiritual
theological philosophy a philosophical
guy who would um I don't know I had a
certain picture in my head but it turns
out he's a jock at one point in his life
he was an athlete a football player and
it was really sort of like you know
narrative violation for me but when he
thinks about finite and infinite games
he literally comes from a background of
real Sports and games and it's when we
talk about like you know
hyper games on top of ethereum you
really should actually think about real
games as well not like an abstract Game
Theory
a starting point so I've been sort of
collecting I've been thinking about
these things for like several years and
those of you have been talking to you
know that I can go on at length about
several of these so for example
mediocrity over Excellence is one of the
points that gets me in the most trouble
I've written a 12 Bar blog series about
it uh so if you want to argue with me
you're going to have to read that first
I like this idea of like you know
there's a lot of bureaucracy and
bureaucracy gets a bad name but you know
you guys have things that sound
extremely bureaucratic and that's a good
thing
eip1234 or whatever I love it and I like
the idea of bureaucracy over monarchs
Messiahs and mobs and this principle
it's kind of like a port of an old ietf
principle that says something like we
don't believe in Kings or democracy we
believe in rough consensus and running
code I think we need an update of that
and that might be a good one fat
overlaid I've written a bunch about it I
want to say a little bit about the
seventh one which is entangled fan outs
over you Forks sorry I don't know
if I'm allowed to say that to you but
the idea that you know became popular in
the last 10 years a good idea of like
you know exit over voice
it's sort of
went cancerous and now everybody is like
exiting from each other and it's like
you know a few I'm going to create my
own future over there and I think that's
gotten unhealthy and really I love what
I see in the ethereum community so
yesterday in the r d Workshop it was a
funny thing happened they had the big
room and when the two breakout sessions
started there was this group on one end
I have a photo I meant to put it in but
I couldn't at a fine time but in one
room one end of the room there was a
bunch of people discussing some complex
number Theory and in the other end some
really janky practical implementation
stuff on software and the room hadn't
really been designed for that so both
started talking loudly and then there
was some crosstalk and there was some
joking and then both started speaking
very softly and I think that is yeah
you're exploring many Futures with like
a fork of um a garden of forking paths
but they're not like independent and
exiting from each other they're
entangled so I think of that as you know
entangled fan out is about the phrase
I'm thinking of so fan as in like you
know things diverging not fanatic and if
you extrapolate that to the global level
you really kind of want to go towards
planetary mutualism as opposed to you
know Sovereign individualism which seems
to be the maybe it's bitcoin's influence
but Sovereign individualism seems to be
the popular default philosophy in the
crypto world I think planetary mutualism
is what it should be and what ethereum
should lean towards
a bunch of others happy to talk to
anybody who's interested in any of these
they could go on for hours about this uh
I have a couple of minutes left I do
want to acknowledge a bunch of people so
a lot of this thinking actually for the
last couple of years it's been happening
at this group I belong to the collective
we have a Monday morning distributed
systems group that discusses kind of
more technical uh stuff and a Friday
morning study group that talks about
like you know online governance and
social stuff so if you're interested
please do join us and I do want to like
shout out to all the people I've listed
there so John Miguel K Rafa John many
others um all the people who helped me
not make a complete ass of myself as I
was exploring these topics starting a
couple of years ago I have been around
the ethereum ecosystem as a lurker since
the beginning but I only really got into
it a couple of years ago and of course
thanks to Tim and vitalik for a bunch of
helpful conversations so it's like I
ended with a minute to spare so thank
you very much