Vocabulary of a World in Transition

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Concepts you should know about:

A

= "legal entities that have no human controllers".


C

= "the glue of a healthy civil society is the material benefits of cooperation".

Daniel Wortel-London explains:

"Civil society organizations can’t perform the political work we need unless they perform economic work for its members. And this means more than organizing for the sake of demanding reforms from the state or exactions from the private sector. It means creating durable institutions where we can materially provide for one another along solidaristic lines."


Marie Cornu, Thomas Perroud et al. :

"What should we understand by this term?

In an initial approach — one that will, of course, be developed further in the following lines—the term refers to the idea that certain things or goods are marked by a communal dimension. This means they could not only be opened to shared or common use under various modalities but also be protected and preserved for the present and the future, in the interest of all, or of a broader community (national, European, or global), or a more specific community (inhabitants of a town or neighborhood, a creative community, a community of users, etc.).

In the context of this research, we considered that the "communality" of a thing is evaluated based on the degree of openness to the power to decide on its uses; the power to benefit from its utilities; and the power to control these uses and utilities. The less it is legally possible to exclude individuals from exercising these three powers, the more a thing can be said to be communalized. The notion of communality thus refers not only to the idea of a common interest but also to the concept of inclusivity (see below).

From this foundation, the notion of a "scale of communality" has been developed, indicating a gradation in the legal forms and scope of this communal destination. This tool has proven to be interesting because it allows for an understanding of the degree of communality in the legal arrangements of various interests surrounding goods and resources (private interests and common interest(s)) and how the law delineates these boundaries: with what legal frameworks, what guarantees, and also what weaknesses."

Source: the French Report, L'échelle de communalité - Propositions de réformes pour intégrer les biens communs en droit.


D

Peter Limberg explains:

"The “g factor,” or general intelligence factor, is a psychometric construct representing one’s general intelligence—the cognitive ability believed to affect intellectual performance across a range of mental tasks. IQ tests aim to measure this general intelligence factor. But what about measuring one’s “dark factor”?

The “D-Factor,” or dark factor, is colloquially expressed as a score representing how sociopathic an individual might be. Knowing someone’s score could be quite useful. In the “Terrible Communities” series, I wrote about the “sociopath question”:

How do we deal with people with innate power literacy, who are bent toward self-serving motives and are extremely skilled at manipulating social fields?

It only takes one terrible person to terrorize a community."


= concept proposed by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the Ethereum project

"Do not try to enforce stasis. Instead, embrace the chaos of markets and other fast-paced human activity. At the same time, however, tweak rules in such a way that the upsides get funneled into supporting public goods (including quality of the governance itself), and the downsides get capped or even outright removed for the people who are not able to handle it."

- Vitalik Buterin

"A political ideology that openly embraces chaos, but tweaks key rules and incentives to create a background pressure where the consequences of chaos are aligned with the common good."

(https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/04/01/dc.html)


E

Daniel Christian Wahl explains:

"Evolutionary activism is socio-ecological innovation that drives transformative culture change. In kairos, this time of transformation that Joanna Macy calls the “Great Turning”, the personal, the collective and the planetary are intertwined more than ever. She speaks of our dual role, of needing to be both hospice workers of the old “Industrial Growth Society” (with its habits, structures and stories that no longer serve) and midwives of the new, the emerging “life-sustaining society”."

Macy identifies three dimensions of involvement with this process of cultural transformation. The world over, we, the people are engaging in:

i) “actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings”,

ii) “analysis of structural causes and creation of structural alternatives”, and

iii) “a fundamental shift in worldview and values” (Macy & Young Brown, 1998: 17)."

(https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/we-are-coming-back-to-life-and-this-changes-everything-3a5ba8c97044)


Richard Bartlett:

"To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extitution: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)

All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy." (https://c4ss.org/content/50824)


F

Daniel Tutt explains:

"the psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion points out in his studies on groups, political communities form to allow members to flee this sense of persecution. In his Experiences in Groups, Bion describes a similar logic of group belonging, in what he calls the “fight–flight group.” Here, group members identify with a leader by forming a dependency structure that is violent and exclusive. The emergent fight–flight group affirms the zero-sum logic of the capitalist market interior to the group, but it does so on terms that are perceived as fairer and more satisfying than mainstream groups, such as the school, the church, or the army.

In the fight–flight group, the leader plays the role of forming an artificial environment in which the competition of the wider society is reenacted within the group, but on terms that are more transparent. Like the Nietzschean community which affirms the winner-loser myth by active separation and division from those deemed weak or inferior, the fight–flight group does the same thing, but they rely on a leader to enact this separation from the wider society. The fight–flight group thus sustains the winner-loser mythology by rejecting the dominant liberal version and fortifying the community as a perfect alternative to it. Problems inevitably arise within the fight–flight group because the leader, as a savior figure takes it upon himself to perform victoriously against a hostile world. The fight of the group thus becomes the reserve of the leader alone and they leave little to no room for group members to enact their power. This results in the inability of the fight-flight group to satisfy the independence of each member, and they become what Bion refers to as a “dependent group.” A dependent group is formed around a leader whose authority is taken to be benevolent but who remains the only actor within the group that can confront the hostile outside world."


Travis Kling:

– "the idea that cost of living is strangling most Americans; that upward mobility opportunity is out of reach for increasingly more people; that the American Dream is mostly a thing of the past; and that median home prices divided by median income is at a completely untenable level."


H

  • Horological Politics

= how keeping and enforcing time is linked to political power

Saffron Huang explains:

"The visible imposition of time has very often been a deliberate means of exerting control over lives. Sometimes, this display of control is meant to achieve a sense of security through projecting order in chaotic times. The world’s oldest known surviving mechanical clock was installed in medieval Chioggia, soon after a war between Genoa and Venice that left the main piazza blood-stained and the economy devastated. The city council invested what little money it had in a clock tower, as a sign of order for their citizens.

In general,

- public clock towers have always been used to project political power.

By instilling temporal order, public clock towers also aim to instill a sense of civic order.

This civic order can generate a sense of comfort—or not, depending on which people are controlling time for which people’s attention.

Within days of invading, colonists in Africa’s Cape of Good Hope instilled a militarized time signal: the firing of a hilltop cannon everyday at noon. Phenomenologically, a cannon is experienced very differently from a clock tower: associated with war and death, the boom of a cannon carries for miles. Symbolically, it conveys a different message from a local timepiece for a city’s citizens; it asserts control in hopes of unsettling people, rather than reassuring. Every day, the British cannon reverberated clearly in the ears of rival imperial settlers and the indigenous African people and continues to make Cape Town visitors anxious to this day.

Something very similar played out after the bloodshed of India’s First War of Independence, when the British Raj embarked on a construction project that included tall and very loud bell-rung clock towers.

It has been said,

- if the clock was an avatar of Western time, the bell was its amplifier.

The bell-rung clock tower administers a reminder of order, and who can enforce it, to eyes and ears far and wide. The British’s horological supremacy at the height of the empire—London was the center of the clock industry—helped them both to justify (via a sense of technological superiority) and to assert their colonial dominance. More than one hundred clock towers were built in India during the colonial period.

The British imposition of time was oppressive to the people it was imposed on. We have the example of the Australian Indigenous people who had their own timekeeping systems and who resisted and ignored colonial clock faces for a long time, imperially imposed time protocols did finally constrain the unwilling participants with no liberation—telling them to follow protocol and obey their rulers."

(https://summerofprotocols.com/control-and-consciousness-of-time-web)


I

"An Idea Machine is a self-sustaining organism that contains all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes:

- It starts with a distinct ideology, which becomes a memetic engine that drives the formation of a community

- The community’s members start generating ideas amongst themselves

- Eventually, they form an agenda, which articulates how the ideology will be brought into the world. (Communities need agendas to become idea machines; otherwise, they’re just a group of likeminded people, without a directed purpose.)

- The agenda is capitalized by one or several major funders, whose presence ensures that the community’s ideas can move from theory to practice – both in terms of financing, as well as lending operational skills to the effort. (Without funding, an idea machine is just that: an inert system that needs fuel to turn the crank and get it moving.)

- As community members move from ideas to action, they might become scene builders, who help sustain the community, develop the agenda, and attract new members; or operators, who drive the operating initiatives that lead to outcomes – the ultimate purpose of the entire machine. Both types might also lend a hand to create support organizations, whose purpose is to strengthen the values and best practices of the idea machine."


I

"Psychological and game-theory experiments demonstrate the existence of “inequity aversion” among both human and nonhuman primates and the specifically human tendency to punish those who behave inequitably even if administering the punishment incurs a cost to the punisher. For example, Sergey Gavrilets (2012) has used agent-based modeling to show that each individual benefits if within-group competition is reduced and that strong coalitionary action against bullies could have reduced within-group competition in prehistoric hunter-gatherer bands to the extent that conditions would have favored selection for a psychological disposition called the “egalitarian syndrome,” ."including empathy, altruism, and egalitarian morals. Recent studies in neuroscience show that economic inequity is evaluated in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Te pre- frontal cortex controls executive functions of the brain, which suggests that inequity aversion is related to a phylogenetically recent reorganization of frontal cortical circuitry in the human lineage."


L

  • “longevity escape velocity.”

https://popularmechanics.com/science/a62990579/humans-backwards-in-time/

"It sounds super sci-fi, but it’s basically the idea that as our life extension technology gets better, our life expectancy could increase by more than we age over a set period of time. For example, as medical innovations continue to move forward, we would still age a year over the span of a year. But our life expectancy would go up by, say, a year and two months, meaning we would functionally get two months of life back.

In March of this year, Ray Kurzweil—former Google engineer and prominent AI-centric futurist—told multiple outlets that he believed humanity would achieve longevity escape velocity by 2029."


N

Defined by Marcin Jakubowski:

"Neosubsistence: The combination of advanced material and information technologies introduces a new economic option that we call neosubsistence. This is modern day means to livelihood where wise use of advanced technology and ready access to information allows one to spend a small amount of time in self-sufficiency production. This leads to a high quality of life where higher skill provides more resources in-house, reduces the need to 'work to make a living,' and opens up time for other pursuits. It is a route to promoting a bioregional economy, which relies more on its own resources rather than uncontrollable global market forces. This promotes accountability and reduces the necessity of war."


Tiberius Brastaviceanu explains:

"What I see here, in terms of tools, is the creation of an NIP (Network Intangible Planning) as a parallel system to an NRP (Network Resource Planning), or an extension of the NRP in the intangible dimension. Thus, the layer of intangibles can be better coupled to the layer of tangibles, which means coupling happiness to the real economy, connecting processes that make people happy to processes that make people innovative and productive.

Technically, I see a path towards that. First inspiration is Verna Allee's treatment of intangibles for corporations (the real economy), through the concept of value networks. Note that Verna wrote her papers long time ago, some of the may be outdated, but the lesson here is that the wealth of corporation is largely driven by intangibles, which the management layer doesn't even know they exist and don't monitor. These intangibles are not affected by organizational boundaries, they flow through human to human relations from one firm to another, which is what she calls value network. Verna calls on CEOs and managers to become conscious about intangibles and their flows, and put in place policy that captures and converts these intangibles into tangibles. Now that's a BIG lesson.

Another piece to this puzzle is Arthur Brock from Holochain with his Metacurrency Project. Using his concept of current-see, Art describes symbolic systems that have the ability to influence and even organize or structure flows in society, and these current-sees can be applied to tangibles as well as to intangibles. Therefore, one can apply Art's concept of current-see to Verna's flows of intangibles, to create symbolic systems that shape the flows of intangibles.

One can use Blockchain and use tokens of non-monetary nature to do just that, experiment and see what happens. This is precisely what wee do in Sensorica, with OVN, using various Benefit Redistribution Algorithms to incentivize collaboration. No one knows what scheme works best in context, one needs to try and good patterns will emerge."

(via email, December 2024)


P

Jonathan Zawada:

"The concept of Planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.

“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Blake and Gilman write.

As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.”

(Noema, April 2024)


Paul Dylan-Ennis explains:

"Ethereum culture can be split into three categories: cypherpunk, solarpunk and lunarpunk. I say "can" because some argue the -punk distinctions could happily be folded into one."


  • Popularism

Explained as the strategy of the Democrats in the last election:

Jon Stewart Dem Autopsy Takes https://youtube.com/BA5687kROLk?si=bMXBIp69Zk2brDd4 via @YouTube


@MichaNarberhaus explains, in this paradoxical defense of the new administration in the U.S.:

"bringing manufacturing jobs and agricultural production closer to home, as the Trump administration plans to do, makes good environmental sense. The accelerating pace of globalisation in recent decades has always been criticised by serious environmentalists. Apart from the huge environmental impact of transporting goods around the world, the idea of managing and improving environmental and social standards globally through complex bureaucratic systems, rather than making the world more sustainable and humane, has made multinational corporations more powerful at the expense of small producers who cannot keep up with the bureaucratic requirements. JD Vance's idea of strengthening families, local communities and local economies seems to me to be a more important step towards a sustainable future than trying desperately to implement a global system of sustainability.

Another positive aspect of the new administration could be Bobby Kennedy's commitment to regenerative agriculture. As part of his mandate to make America healthy again, he may be able to provide some positive impetus in this direction."


"The purpose of this brief is to provide an introduction to an increasingly popular way of communicating outputs of research: the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) model. This model came into practice in the early 2000s, and it is now beginning to grow more rapidly. Here, we explain the model for the benefit of researchers, research funders, research institutions, and others in the scholarly communication ecosystem, and we provide data on uptake of the model to date."


R

  • Reality Privilege (lack of):

https://independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/how-four-billionaires-are-trying-to-persuade-us-real-life-isnt-worth-saving/a690887865.html

"In an interview in 2021, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen discussed an impending cultural divide. “The vast majority of humanity,” he said, “lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.” He promised to build digital products for precisely this kind of consumer, “no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in”.​"


  • Re-Enchantment

as in: the return of the supernatural in a high tech world (here below in its christian incarnation)

Rod Dreher: Covid fueled the Christian re-enchantment

https://youtube.com/Gg5exn6J3Lk?si=6Qa3yCJ1b8QcT0vU via @YouTube


S

Akasha:

"So, what is a "shared field"? In scientific terms, it refers to a domain where certain interactions permeate, predicated on our coexistence and varying by time and space. Simply put, it's the mutual interaction in a given time and space where we coexist. Or from another perspective, it's the world influenced by our collective consciousness.

Back to our reality, this shared field is the world created when I chat with a friend on the sofa, or when I open WeChat and see our conversation from five minutes ago. It's also the world built within Web3 communities on platforms like Discord, where people discuss NFTs.

This "shared field" isn't mine or yours but ours—a slice of space in a particular timeframe. The difference between the shared field and my personal field is that we often mistakenly believe we are always in our personal fields. But the influence of the shared field on our perceived world is much greater than we think."

(https://akasha.buzz/what-is-the-shared-field)


A market for stake: The key to distributed value

Dick Bryan explains:

"The stake market ... must encode more than ‘price’ if it is to deliver critical signalling to the network. Stake offered to the market must encode information about the social priorities which will be expressed in the performances and outputs it funds. Stake must carry a value proposition (a verifiable claim that performance outputs create social benefits), not presume a profit proposition. Buying and selling stake is thereby a social debate about value propositions. As staking momentums shift over time, so too does the network’s overall view on ‘what creates value’ change over time. The granularity of information required for this process must be revealed and preserved. In an era of Big Data, it is possible to preserve this information in a way Hayek could not have imagined.

For staking to play this pivotal role of simultaneously funding investment and debating value-creation proposals, it cannot be driven by private wealth accumulation. In this network, staking cannot be funded from accumulated wealth. Staking must be a reciprocal relation between each agent and the network of ‘other’ agents.

The following protocol is therefore critical: to acquire stake in another agent, each agent must relinquish stake in itself. The more an agent wants to acquire ownership of other agents, the more they must relinquish their own stake. It should be clear now why it is critical to avoid confusion with a capitalist stock market.

Further, for staking to be a transparent, network-wide articulation of ‘voting’ on value priorities, reciprocal staking cannot be a barter relationship (a one-to-one relationship); it must be a one-to-many relationship (each agent with the network) through an impersonal, distributed stake market with automated matching, netting, and clearing. William’s review does not feature our specific proposals about an automated staking market, though the general issue arises later, in compatible ways, in the context of his valuable discussion of ‘federated learning’ and data sharing."

https://cambridge.org/core/journals/finance-and-society/article/designing-postcapitalist-finance-in-protocols-for-postcapitalist-expression/D6F7F7D6CC48200F4C7F6990F9F67B31


T

  • What is a 'Theoros' (ancient Greek)

https://theorosproject.substack.com/p/the-theoros-project

"The Theōros: An Ancient Figure for the 21st Century

In seeking a model for this new type of scholar, we find inspiration in an ancient Greek figure: the theōros—a contemplative, a representative, and a traveler. The word means “seer,” “observer,” or “spectator.” As a group, the theōroi were practitioners in the art of theōria (contemplation), from which our word “theory” also derives. A theōros could be a figure of civic, philosophical, or religious importance. At times, the theōros would move among all three of these spheres. In this sense, theōroi were not just contemplatives but also delegates and civic representatives, travelers who would move from city to city to bear witness to events of special significance.

Indeed, one could find the theōroi traveling to Olympia, to Delphi, and to other Greek city-states during moments of importance. The theōroi would come to observe and then return home to give an account of the event to their community. In their contemplative modes, theōroi were also committed to that higher seeing we associate with religious pilgrimage to sanctuaries and sacred places. Travel for a theōros can thus mean physical travel but also theoric travel—a different kind of journey and return seen in the movements between history and timelessness, sacred and secular, and immanence and transcendence.

The concept of traditional theōria in ancient Greek culture, then, encompassed a range of meanings, from sacred observation to civic participation. Originally referring to delegates at religious festivals or spectators at public events, it evolved to include travelers and explorers of many kinds. At its core, theōria involved a journey or pilgrimage, often to witness these sacred events or spectacles. This practice included three key elements: the journey from home, focused contemplation, and a return journey, with the act of seeing a sacred event or place at its center."


Reilly Smethurst et al. :

"We ... claim that DeFi’s governance is timocratic. This reflects the fact that DeFi’s elites are not simply wealthy; they are sometimes “shadowy” and unidentified as well.

Timocracy is a type of stakeholder governance that dates back to the Solonian Constitution from the sixth century BC. It involves both producers (developers) and property owners (token-holders) that pursue a mixture of particular interests and common interests. Timocracy’s main risk is effectively the same as the risk identified by Warwick: if a timocracy degenerates, then it becomes an oligarchy (or a plutocracy).

As discussed in Plato’s Republic [545a–550c], a timocracy is a conflicted mix of community-oriented virtues and private wealth accumulation. Timocracy’s emblematic rulers hide their wealth in “treasuries and strongrooms”, which implies that timocratic power is crypto- (‘concealed or secret’). “Victory and honour”, in a timocratic regime, are obtained via calculated risks and courageous conquests, not via harmonious rationality or dialectical reason. Timocratic rulers accumulate wealth in subtle ways that are odds with the commons, and they “run away from the law like children running away from their father”. Socrates’ contemporary Sparta is an example of a timocratic regime, and it enjoys an eponymous relationship with Synthetix’s Spartan Council. Incidentally, Lycurgus of Sparta first implemented a separated powers model, which Synthetix and Yearn Finance later adopted.

A timocracy degenerates into an oligarchy when its constitution is rewritten to explicitly reserve power for the wealthy, and when contracts are created to purposefully exacerbate the division between a wealthy class and a poor class. Although our nine DeFi cases are tacitly governed by wealthy, above-average token-holders (whales), average and below-average token-holders (minnows) are allowed to participate in the governance procedures. The minnows’ participation is not as effective as the whales’ participation; but it is not strictly precluded. Furthermore, developments like Synthetix’s quadratic voting are intended to stop the inequality gap from widening.

To reiterate, DeFi’s governance is timocratic. DeFi’s timocratic rulers – the unregistered, above-average token-holders – accumulate more power over time by purchasing even more tokens. The concentration of power is gradual, subtle, and putatively neutral, because crypto-asset marketplaces are open to all. DeFi’s timocratic governance could degenerate and become oligarchic if above-average token-holders vote for so-called improvement proposals that significantly diminish the power of average and below-average token-holders, or if they vote for changes that make it more difficult for newcomers to acquire and exercise voting rights [42; 550d–551b]. Such actions would further strengthen the “old guard”."

(https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X23000568?via%3Dihub)


V

"Tech extremism emerges from the power grab of right-wing venture capitalists in the tech industry. Having grown exceedingly rich in the first two internet bubbles, this element now seeks to compromise the US government with campaign donations, to assume a new level of power and wealth, and attain forms of legal, economic and regulatory sovereignty, where they can operate outside of any other nation-state power."


Niall Ferguson:

"In a clever Substack post in February, Santiago Pliego tried to sum up the change that had occurred from the epoch of woke—which began with the cancellation of James Damore by Google in 2017—to the unfiltered era of Elon Musk’s X.

“Fundamentally,” Pliego wrote, “the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.”

To be precise:

The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete.

The Vibe Shift is a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgment.

The Vibe Shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth—whatever the cost.

The Vibe Shift is directly facing our tumultuous times, refusing to blackpill, and choosing to build instead.

The vibe shift hit American politics on the night of November 5. What no one foresaw was that it would almost immediately go global, too."

(https://thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-the-vibe-shift-goes-global-assad-putin-trump)


4

"The “B” in 4B translates to “no” (“bi” in Korean) — the “bis” being:

no sex with men

no giving birth

no dating men

no marriage with men"

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