I appreciated your sentiment, your work, and the ongoing formalization of your thoughts. I’d love to see your projects evolve and flourish.
Responses to direct quotations:
“Financialized (extractive, zero-sum) outcomes occur in the absence of collusion prevention"
1. It’s not evident to me that financialization is equivalent to zero-sum. 2. It’s not evident to me that extraction is necessarily undesirable; e.g. we extract calories from plants when we eat them, and this is desirable to me.
“Structures and systems allow greater complexity, and thus greater abundance, but the replacement of relationships with transactions creates opportunities for exploitation and abuse.”
1. Exploitation, as a Marxian economic category, is not strictly a form of abuse/harm, but is often conflated with one.
2. Abuse happened before the “replacement of relationships with [financial] transactions”.
3. I argue that all relationships are transactions, and that the evolution into capitalism is a manifestation of more explicit and precisely calculated transactions within a larger, more complex system of transactions. There's also further evolution needed&wanted.
4. It’s not obvious to me that this transition creates more abuse than previous social forms, at least per capita (population growth would create more total abuse even with a declining rate of abuse).
“Financialized systems are much more stable if their incentives are anchored around a system that is ultimately non-financial.” The task... is to articulate a design framework for repeatably weaving together transactional (short-term) and relational (long-term) systems into deeper and richer new wholes… without losing... meaningful relationships.”
- Financial systems (as all systems) are anchored in every non-financial system which underlies them as causes, all the way to the most basic/ubiquitous causal system we can identify. I make an argument that all specific, empirical systems are anchored in a more unitary, fundamental, universal system, which we can call the ground of reality, universal law, or just the underlying incentives, which are identical to the basic facets of experience; panexperientialism.
“1) earned by doing work, 2) could not be sold or transferred, and 3) decayed automatically over time. Unlike the fully financialized token-governance schemes then (and still) prevalent in web3... decay reflects an underlying sacred time, rather than being the result of unoriented action.”
1. I think past work/experience is also valuable. This reminds me of the principle of liquid democracy, a method to calculate embedded social trust and thereby the relative reliability of various decision-makings (1. The reliability of decision makers in certain spheres, and 2 . the reliability of decisions themselves via a direct-democracy mechanism overlaid on top of a liquid-democracy; e.g. “I trust person X to make decisions about this kind of thing, but not to make decisions about who is trustworthy”, where person X then provides their perspective/policy stance as well as their trust of others in various areas, and these trust relationships are aggregated). Past experience (existing social trust) would also make global rep distribution dynamic without artificial decay / social-value deflation. Recency bias can be factored in through updated valuation systems of the experience/work itself. I think we can all agree and find instances where financialization values some work disproportionately to what we could assign as its true value, but I would not call it directionless, but rather “less intentional/long-term/deeply aware” etc. Because, it's all relative (relational). It’s also clear that financialization does emerge a relational play-space quite a lot: e.g. entertainment industries, betting, personal favors, status based social cliques, special-identity indicators (clothes, tattoos, fandom merch, makeup, art), etc.
2. I don’t follow how decay prevents lack of orientation, and I would argue that all action is oriented, fundamentally and towards the same universal objective. Otherwise, you have to invoke unexplainability/ true randomness/ “something from nothing”.
“Thought was put into how different pieces of information would be made explicit (represented symbolically), or left implicit and thus dependent on an evolving intersubjective understanding. Our intuition was that the more that could be left implicit, the more easily the formal system could be grounded in a relational context.”
- I would relate to this almost conversely. Explicit information can (and always does) evolve through intersubjective understanding. Like science. And this evolutionary tendency, and the special desire/ high valuation of it, can also be made explicit. I imagine that this enhances the rate of evolution of understanding and efficacy of systems. To be explicit about more variable or less valuable/fundamental systems could seemingly enable them to shift more easily. Everything is relatively explicit/implicit: there are degrees of precision/fullness of articulation. The more something is articulated/communicated, the more widely and deeply it is understood. I strive for understanding and explicitness in pursuit of success/efficacy.
“The homeostatic return-to-baseline orients the mechanism around forgiveness over time, allowing hearts to support meaningful emotional repair… [avoiding] cold, transactional logic.”
1. I would suggest that forgiveness does not imply forgetting past behavior, but rather the acknowledgement that change is possible, and that past challenging behavior is not bad per se, just less aligned than positive behavior – avoiding some of the shame associated with it.
2. Repair seems more likely to succeed when past behavior is acknowledged, made explicit, and when a better path forward is explicitly communicated and agreed upon.
3. Transactional logic can seem cold when the transactions are limited to those regarding money/financial markets, which are obviously limited in scope and evaluation capability. I make the case that all relationships are transactions: all relationships are intentional, cyclical flows of energy. All actions aim towards “better”, and include feedback/bidirectional flow to gauge the relative value/desirability of the outcome. All relationships have value. All action includes bidirectional subjective evaluation, and choice with regards to the evaluation of outcome (the desire/striving for better).
“Points reset to zero, preventing compounding accumulation (or debt)”
- Not sure how your systems would allow for compound growth regardless. I would suggest that long-term accounting and visibility can be helpful. Debt can be addressed in creative ways, and carries info relevant to incentivisation and expectation.
“While nice in theory, the points-for-rent would have undermined the “magic circle” of communal life by introducing external wealth disparities into an otherwise relational space.”
- External relationships always inform internal relationships: they are not and should not be isolated in understanding or in practice (which are ultimately unitary). A fear of money can be overcome by overlaying a more intentional/deeper agreement of shared value, and relating to the distribution and use of money accordingly.
“Embeddedness is the idea that a system should be responsive to human thoughts, feelings, and values, instead of imposing machine values onto people.”
- Machines were created by humans, and imposed with human values in their relationships to the social system. I have also had intense resistance to this, and capitalism, though.
“This idea connects to our discussion of the sacred. The sacred is a fixed point... around which experience revolves, while the profane, uniform and relative, drifts without orientation.”
- I agree that the sacred is more fixed. In fact, it's so fixed – so consistent, ubiquitous, and universal – that it cannot be escaped. There is no absolute profane, only that which is less or more sacred.
“In our examples, meaning and relationality are preserved through an asymmetric limitation on what a symbol can do. A fungible token has no orientation... [its] homogeneity... can accrue no meaning or history, apart from financial value.”
- Aren't limitations always asymmetric? And, isn't money limited? I have realized that all symbols, representations, references, tokens, etc. have history, meaning, and value apart from strictly capitalist relations. I think we can agree that systems beyond/outside of capitalism (emotions, biology, physics, etc.) influence our relationship with money, the way we use money, and therefore how money operates. All values are related to others.
P.s. 'Positive Realizations: One-Pagers', my most recent Substack contribution, gives an intro to my philosophical thought.
I appreciated your sentiment, your work, and the ongoing formalization of your thoughts. I’d love to see your projects evolve and flourish.
Responses to direct quotations:
“Financialized (extractive, zero-sum) outcomes occur in the absence of collusion prevention"
1. It’s not evident to me that financialization is equivalent to zero-sum. 2. It’s not evident to me that extraction is necessarily undesirable; e.g. we extract calories from plants when we eat them, and this is desirable to me.
“Structures and systems allow greater complexity, and thus greater abundance, but the replacement of relationships with transactions creates opportunities for exploitation and abuse.”
1. Exploitation, as a Marxian economic category, is not strictly a form of abuse/harm, but is often conflated with one.
2. Abuse happened before the “replacement of relationships with [financial] transactions”.
3. I argue that all relationships are transactions, and that the evolution into capitalism is a manifestation of more explicit and precisely calculated transactions within a larger, more complex system of transactions. There's also further evolution needed&wanted.
4. It’s not obvious to me that this transition creates more abuse than previous social forms, at least per capita (population growth would create more total abuse even with a declining rate of abuse).
“Financialized systems are much more stable if their incentives are anchored around a system that is ultimately non-financial.” The task... is to articulate a design framework for repeatably weaving together transactional (short-term) and relational (long-term) systems into deeper and richer new wholes… without losing... meaningful relationships.”
- Financial systems (as all systems) are anchored in every non-financial system which underlies them as causes, all the way to the most basic/ubiquitous causal system we can identify. I make an argument that all specific, empirical systems are anchored in a more unitary, fundamental, universal system, which we can call the ground of reality, universal law, or just the underlying incentives, which are identical to the basic facets of experience; panexperientialism.
“1) earned by doing work, 2) could not be sold or transferred, and 3) decayed automatically over time. Unlike the fully financialized token-governance schemes then (and still) prevalent in web3... decay reflects an underlying sacred time, rather than being the result of unoriented action.”
1. I think past work/experience is also valuable. This reminds me of the principle of liquid democracy, a method to calculate embedded social trust and thereby the relative reliability of various decision-makings (1. The reliability of decision makers in certain spheres, and 2 . the reliability of decisions themselves via a direct-democracy mechanism overlaid on top of a liquid-democracy; e.g. “I trust person X to make decisions about this kind of thing, but not to make decisions about who is trustworthy”, where person X then provides their perspective/policy stance as well as their trust of others in various areas, and these trust relationships are aggregated). Past experience (existing social trust) would also make global rep distribution dynamic without artificial decay / social-value deflation. Recency bias can be factored in through updated valuation systems of the experience/work itself. I think we can all agree and find instances where financialization values some work disproportionately to what we could assign as its true value, but I would not call it directionless, but rather “less intentional/long-term/deeply aware” etc. Because, it's all relative (relational). It’s also clear that financialization does emerge a relational play-space quite a lot: e.g. entertainment industries, betting, personal favors, status based social cliques, special-identity indicators (clothes, tattoos, fandom merch, makeup, art), etc.
2. I don’t follow how decay prevents lack of orientation, and I would argue that all action is oriented, fundamentally and towards the same universal objective. Otherwise, you have to invoke unexplainability/ true randomness/ “something from nothing”.
“Thought was put into how different pieces of information would be made explicit (represented symbolically), or left implicit and thus dependent on an evolving intersubjective understanding. Our intuition was that the more that could be left implicit, the more easily the formal system could be grounded in a relational context.”
- I would relate to this almost conversely. Explicit information can (and always does) evolve through intersubjective understanding. Like science. And this evolutionary tendency, and the special desire/ high valuation of it, can also be made explicit. I imagine that this enhances the rate of evolution of understanding and efficacy of systems. To be explicit about more variable or less valuable/fundamental systems could seemingly enable them to shift more easily. Everything is relatively explicit/implicit: there are degrees of precision/fullness of articulation. The more something is articulated/communicated, the more widely and deeply it is understood. I strive for understanding and explicitness in pursuit of success/efficacy.
“The homeostatic return-to-baseline orients the mechanism around forgiveness over time, allowing hearts to support meaningful emotional repair… [avoiding] cold, transactional logic.”
1. I would suggest that forgiveness does not imply forgetting past behavior, but rather the acknowledgement that change is possible, and that past challenging behavior is not bad per se, just less aligned than positive behavior – avoiding some of the shame associated with it.
2. Repair seems more likely to succeed when past behavior is acknowledged, made explicit, and when a better path forward is explicitly communicated and agreed upon.
3. Transactional logic can seem cold when the transactions are limited to those regarding money/financial markets, which are obviously limited in scope and evaluation capability. I make the case that all relationships are transactions: all relationships are intentional, cyclical flows of energy. All actions aim towards “better”, and include feedback/bidirectional flow to gauge the relative value/desirability of the outcome. All relationships have value. All action includes bidirectional subjective evaluation, and choice with regards to the evaluation of outcome (the desire/striving for better).
“Points reset to zero, preventing compounding accumulation (or debt)”
- Not sure how your systems would allow for compound growth regardless. I would suggest that long-term accounting and visibility can be helpful. Debt can be addressed in creative ways, and carries info relevant to incentivisation and expectation.
“While nice in theory, the points-for-rent would have undermined the “magic circle” of communal life by introducing external wealth disparities into an otherwise relational space.”
- External relationships always inform internal relationships: they are not and should not be isolated in understanding or in practice (which are ultimately unitary). A fear of money can be overcome by overlaying a more intentional/deeper agreement of shared value, and relating to the distribution and use of money accordingly.
“Embeddedness is the idea that a system should be responsive to human thoughts, feelings, and values, instead of imposing machine values onto people.”
- Machines were created by humans, and imposed with human values in their relationships to the social system. I have also had intense resistance to this, and capitalism, though.
“This idea connects to our discussion of the sacred. The sacred is a fixed point... around which experience revolves, while the profane, uniform and relative, drifts without orientation.”
- I agree that the sacred is more fixed. In fact, it's so fixed – so consistent, ubiquitous, and universal – that it cannot be escaped. There is no absolute profane, only that which is less or more sacred.
“In our examples, meaning and relationality are preserved through an asymmetric limitation on what a symbol can do. A fungible token has no orientation... [its] homogeneity... can accrue no meaning or history, apart from financial value.”
- Aren't limitations always asymmetric? And, isn't money limited? I have realized that all symbols, representations, references, tokens, etc. have history, meaning, and value apart from strictly capitalist relations. I think we can agree that systems beyond/outside of capitalism (emotions, biology, physics, etc.) influence our relationship with money, the way we use money, and therefore how money operates. All values are related to others.
P.s. 'Positive Realizations: One-Pagers', my most recent Substack contribution, gives an intro to my philosophical thought.