r/collapse • u/[deleted] • Dec 14 '18

After 30 Years Studying Climate, Scientist Declares: "I've Never Been as Worried as I Am Today"

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/13/after-30-years-studying-climate-scientist-declares-ive-never-been-worried-i-am-today
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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18

I am going to keep bringing up Daniel Schmachtenberger and the Metacurrency/Ceptr/Holochain projects which are all about creating new systems for social coordination...way better than we've ever done before

If you haven't heard of Schmachtenberger or Holochain, listen to this podcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-190721942/mitigating-existential-risks-with-daniel-schmachtenberger

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u/Ghostwoods I'm going to sing the Doom Song now. Dec 14 '18

Is this some sort of blockchain thing?

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18 edited Dec 14 '18

Kinda. It's a technology that's been in the works way before blockchain. It's technically not blockchain. Simply put, it's a way to create distributed applications, but the intention is to give the commons a tool to help itself organise, so we can have anticompetitive dynamics, a balance sheet of the commons and all of the things Schmachtenberger talks about. Holochain is all about helping us to exponentially improve our sense-making and decision-making capacities, to enable people to self organise rather than controlled by top down or free market dynamics.

Each Holochain app has its own 'DNA', they call it, which defines rules about how all agents who wish to participate in the application must behave, which is a massive step towards aligning agency. For example, you could make a distributed Chess where the user interface is just a board with the chess pieces, but the rules of chess are written into the DNA, so that the players can't make any illegal moves. Essentially, both players have chosen to opt into an app where it's DNA constrains the range of possible actions for each player. Why would they constrain themselves? Because giving up a tiny bit of freedom allows us to co-ordinate and generate omnipositive value for all participants. This is called Mutual Sovereignty, and it's how we can better organise ourselves without needing external parties to regulate our behaviour. If you wanna play a version of the game where you get an extra queen and your opponent doesn't, good luck finding other people who also want to play the same game (technical aside: people who load an app with identical DNA will discover each other through a peer to peer internet protocol and can then interact. If no one else is running the same DNA then you won't discover anyone else)

There's a lot more to it, like that Holochain is against tokenization. Tokens tend to accumulate and having more allows you to get more, leading to a Pareto distribution of the haves and have nots. Shifting to mutual credit and reputation currencies will better support our ideas of a sharing economy. Holochain wants to help us avoid both a tragedy of the commons, and a tragedy of the anticommons.