Great question Nick, tbh I think the answer is simpler than it sounds. The same feedback loop either works for you or on you, and what decides which is where it runs and whether you can leave. Cheap electricity decides who wins the race, ownership decides who the race is for. So the conditions for me is your agent runs where your data lives, at home, it only gets the keys you hand it, and you can swap out any middleman without losing your stuff. You're right that tech alone doesn't build trust, your Uber on Holochain point nails it, decentralise the pipes and they still own the customers and the reputation. That's the bit we need to also care about, your relationships, reputation and data living with you, so leaving costs nothing and the middleman has to keep earning it. Rong says it best, "do you have choices? If not, it's not a new Internet." We're still early, building the ElastOS runtime which makes this the default. The trust part is still up to people, the tech just stops it being taken from them.

imagine a non-scarce money?

money could flow like love. (we just have to program it to)

Yea, so I share the idea that we can do coordination & governance so much better, but to what end? Public investment is directed & coordinated by captive, archaic & bureaucratic processes!? That's not changing short of revolution Philanthropy isn't enough. So...?

If you need a good explanation of why Nick Land matters, then this is a very good intro by @DanielPinchbeck : danielpinchbeck.substack.com…?

* Video conversation: The Singularity is Here. Now What? | Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly youtu.be/Dqr82eem4Zw?si=O-7C… via @YouTube (Kevin is a Catholic, it plays a big role in this conversation) "In this episode, Kelly puts the question of how to build moral AI in religious and spiritual terms. Kelly co-founded Wired and spent decades earning a reputation as a technological prophet. Now he calls himself a heretic, arguing that organized religion will be transformed, if not destroyed, by contact with a host of alien intelligences. If we want to survive this encounter, our understanding of God may matter more than any computer code."

all models are wrong, some are useful. here are 5 different models for understanding the forces shaping civilization i find particularly provocative: 1. nick land: technocapital capitalism isn't just an economic system. it's an emerging machine intelligence, using markets, competition, and technology to assemble itself. capital builds more powerful machines. those machines generate more capital. each cycle makes the system more autonomous and harder to live outside of. what if we're no longer building technology to serve humanity, but reorganizing humanity to serve the machine? 2. nate hagens (@NJHagens): the economic superorganism the economy is an emergent superorganism made up of billions of humans, companies, and institutions collectively optimizing for growth. cheap energy enables growth. growth creates dependence on more energy. nobody is steering the whole thing, but everyone is participating. what if civilization is an energy-hungry organism consuming the conditions for its own existence? 3. ray kurzweil (@raykurzweil): the technological singularity evolution isn't limited to biology. intelligence is part of a billions-year process of increasing complexity, and technology is accelerating it. intelligence builds better tools. better tools enable greater intelligence. the feedback loop accelerates beyond human comprehension. what if humanity isn't the endpoint of evolution, but a transitional species building its successor? 4. paul kingsnorth: the machine modern technological civilization isn't just a collection of tools. it's a worldview that treats nature, culture, and human beings as things to be optimized, controlled, and remade. technology creates dependence on technological systems. those systems erode the traditions, communities, and relationships that once gave us autonomy. what if progress is destroying some of the things that make life worth living? 5. sara walker & lee cronin: assembly theory complex objects don't just appear. they emerge through histories of selection, where successful structures are preserved, copied, and built upon. life is a process through which information becomes causal, shaping what gets constructed next. what if intelligence and technology are continuations of the same evolutionary process that produced life? five different ontologies: - land sees capital assembling intelligence. - hagens sees energy organizing complexity. - kurzweil sees intelligence accelerating evolution. - kingsnorth sees technology consuming the human world. - walker & cronin see selection accumulating complexity. they disagree on what's driving civilization and where it's heading. but all five challenge the assumption that humanity is consciously steering technological progress. the questions i'm left with: - are we shaping technology, or is technology shaping us? - and how do we reclaim the agency to choose what we become?

A concept you should know about: * Negative Commons , wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Negat… Alexandre Monnin explains: Digital technologies are what José Halloy calls zombie technologies: technologies whose metabolism is fundamentally incompatible with what we have learned over recent decades about how the Earth system functions. We can characterize them in several ways. First, they rely on stocks of non-renewable materials — minerals, metals, and metalloids — that must be extracted from the Earth's subsurface. This is already difficult and is likely to become increasingly so. It is very difficult to determine precisely when extraction will become impossible, because exploration continually reveals new reserves. Reserves are depleted when we do not explore, while known reserves change with exploration and with the technical and economic conditions of extraction. But at some point, this process may become increasingly difficult. We should be relying more on renewable resources rather than finite stocks. Second, these technologies have relatively short functional lifespans, despite requiring extraordinarily sophisticated technical processes to manufacture them. Producing semiconductor chips, for example, is an extremely high-tech activity. It has even become the subject of geopolitical conflict: the United States does not want the expertise of a Dutch company to be transferred to China. These devices are certainly not products of low technology. Finally, these components are manufactured using gallium, germanium, indium, and many other metals from the periodic table that do not participate in the major biogeochemical cycles, such as the carbon cycle. They therefore persist as waste for years and years, especially because recycling remains very limited, particularly for metals dispersed throughout digital equipment. We talk about recycling materials that are not entirely recyclable, or that require energy to recycle. This is a false circularity: circularity that is possible only by investing substantial amounts of energy. And when materials are used in a dispersed way, as metals are in digital devices, even more energy is needed. Otherwise, recycling simply does not work, and we do not do it. Taking materials from beneath the Earth's surface, making them function for a very short period, and then returning them to the environment in a form that will persist for tens of thousands of years is the opposite of the cycle we ought to establish. It is the opposite of a cyclical metabolism. When this process is scaled up to an enormous level, it becomes problematic in every respect. This is not viable at the civilizational scale of thousands of years — the timescale on which José Halloy tries to think, and one that is generally absent from our own thinking. If our civilization becomes digital, while we know that we cannot realistically project the continued existence of digital technology over thousands of years, there is necessarily a contradiction somewhere." (linkedin.com/pulse/lia-g%C3%…)

'a connected system..held together from the inside out..the fascia' facebook.com/reel/1657122109… 'when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying' robert thurman trusting the itch-in-8b-souls as the 'data' we need for the dance to dance

Schopenhauer:

* Society for the History of the Philosophy of Technology Jump to navigationJump to search = "exploring the different ways individuals and social groups have thought about technology throughout history". fasos-research.nl/history-of… "We are a group of social theorists of technology interested in exploring the different ways individuals and social groups have thought about technology throughout history. This includes theories of technology with clearly defined frameworks, methods and concepts, such as Labor Process Theory, Critical Theory, and Phenomenology as well as different traditions of philosophical thought about technology, such as French Philosophy of Technology, Science & Technology Studies (STS), and the Empirical turn. We are also interested in non-traditional philosophies of technology found in the work of writers who are not typically considered social theorists of technology, such as Hannah Arendt and Hans Blumenberg, and the implicit philosophies of technology found across literature, film, and art. On this website you will find different resources on the history of the philosophy of technology. This includes a timeline of works in the philosophy of technology from 1800-1980 and short summaries of some of the traditions that help make up the history of the philosophy of technology."

I get blown away every time I read this paragraph by Carl Jung, written in 1944: “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen or diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.”

* Networks and Sovereignty thecuttingfloor.substack.com…? Chor Pharn discusses network theorists: Parag Khanna, Balaji Srivanasan, Benjamin Bratton, Isabella Kaminska and Di Dongsheng: "A second constellation formed around a recurring embarrassment: every generation announces that a new network has made old sovereignty obsolete, and then discovers a court, a balance sheet, a port, a grid or a central bank sitting underneath it. Parag Khanna taught me to see connectivity as strategic terrain. Ports, corridors, fibre, logistics, cities and finance were not decorations on the geopolitical map. They were part of the map. From Singapore, this was intuitive. We exist partly because flows cross here. But centrality is not control. A node can be exquisitely connected and exquisitely dependent. The same cable that creates relevance creates exposure. A hub earns rents while the network is routed through it and discovers its vulnerability when the network reroutes. Connection -> agency was the illicit arrow. Balaji Srinivasan pushed the network argument further. Digital communities can coordinate before geography. Crypto can create monetary communities before states have categories for them. Remote work can detach valuable labour from place. Exit becomes cheaper. A network can accumulate identity, capital and organisation before it possesses territory. This was not nonsense. The mistake was to let bargaining power become sovereignty. The network can leave California. It still needs somewhere to land. The sovereign has courts, police, land, electricity and the right to say no. Benjamin Bratton made the same destabilisation more serious. The Stack was not a fantasy of escape from sovereignty but an account of sovereignty becoming layered. Earth, cloud, city, address, interface, user: computation increasingly assigns identity, routes action, structures visibility and governs access. The state is no longer the only system performing sovereign-like functions. This aged well. It may age even better in a world of machine agents. But Bratton's temptation is computational: if the world becomes sufficiently legible, perhaps it becomes governable. A system can model the climate and fail to decarbonise. It can model a pandemic and still have politics. A digital twin is not custody. Legibility -> governability. Then Izabella Kaminska enters and asks everyone to stop talking for a moment. Who settles? Where is the collateral? Who needs dollars? Who owns the liability? What happens when the clever new money meets a balance sheet at three in the morning? I have always liked people who ruin a grand theory with an operational question. Kaminska's plumbing is not a footnote to the network world. It is the reminder that abstract flows terminate somewhere. A stablecoin settles against something. A digital transaction eventually encounters law, capital, accounting, energy and a real counterparty. But plumbing can also become its own master key. Deep incumbent liquidity does not tell us where productive capability is moving. Financial, industrial and technological power can remain unbundled for decades. Di Dongsheng brings the same problem into Chinese grand strategy. China can manufacture at enormous scale and still operate inside financial, technological and maritime circuits whose ultimate permissions it does not own. Currency, ports, shipping, capital and energy are not secondary to sovereignty. They are circuits through which sovereignty becomes operational. Yet Di can slide from dependence to the desire for custody. If a circuit matters, control it. Not every dependency should be owned. Some should be diversified, insured, substituted or tolerated. Attempts to eliminate dependence can manufacture the coalition that makes dependence dangerous. The constellation survives because nobody wins. Khanna and Balaji are right that networks alter power. Bratton is right that sovereignty becomes layered. Kaminska is right that the abstract stack has plumbing. Di is right that external circuits can constrain a physically powerful state. And the old sovereign keeps returning, not as the only actor but as the entity that still controls many of the interfaces between layers. This matters enormously for machine civilisation. An agent may reason independently and still need a wallet. A model may be open and still need a chip. A company may be AI-native and still need a jurisdiction. The network did not kill sovereignty. It made sovereignty an interface problem." ()

A concept you should know about: * The Walkaway Stack , wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Walka… '''= "infrastructure resilient enough that people can simply leave systems that extract from them, because they have somewhere else to go."''' [decent.holoventures.io/10-ou…] =More information= Source: Cory Doctorow, Walkaway (Tor Books, 2017).

* The Free Association Protocol: Playnet's core coordination mechanism wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Free_… ; playnet.earth/ Playnet draws on a deep mathematical lineage from the planning tradition, specifically the socialist calculation debate and the subsequent development of linear programming for optimal economic planning. The project's core innovation is to generalize these proven computational methods—currently used by corporations like Amazon and Walmart—to coordinate all of society's supply and demand, rather than just a single firm's vertical, and to change the optimization objective from profit to human need satisfaction. Playnet is not just a software project; it is a mathematical synthesis of the planning tradition. It takes the linear programming of Kantorovich and Koopmans, the input-output modeling of Leontief, the cybernetic feedback of control theory, and the mechanism design of modern protocol engineering, and combines them into a coherent, computable infrastructure for a planned economy. The claim is bold but mathematically grounded: the algorithms for a viable socialist computation now exist, and Playnet is building the machine to run them. Planning and calculation methods used: 1 Linear Programming & Optimal Planning (Kantorovich & Koopmans) 2 Input-Output Analysis & Valueflows 3 Cybernetics & Feedback Systems 4 Recognition Constraint as Mechanism Design

Avoiding this outcome also means avoiding the view of alignment that is unidirectional --e.g. presuming that human values are universal and human society is a control variable. How societies (plural) adapt to the realities and affordances of AGI through active counter-alignment is likely more important than simply building virtuous models from declared principles.

It's sad to see @Artizen winding down. The world desperately needs more funding models.

Michael Hudson on private debts & the challenge of mortgage debt on real estate.