promethea.incorporated

multiheaded1793:

oligopsony:

oligopsony:

Nick Land has conveniently put everything truly interesting and scary about NRx in one short post - whether it’s plausible is a separate question, of course, and deserves further consideration. All the stuff about race and sex or whatever is, as they (the specific they) say, just signalling interestingness or scariness, and not very well.

Serious question - assuming this is plausible, it seems to be neutral with respect to the distribution of property. Can we develop an alternative architecture that auto-enforces a collective or egalitarian distribution of property? That would be one way to make a run around revisionism and other political degenerations. A mutualist version of this appears to be what the Democratic Catallaxy people are after, though I can’t say I’m super-impressed so far by their concrete proposals. (Likewise Urbit thankfully doesn’t seem especially impressive to people in the know either, but as always, the ideas of the things are bigger than the first attempt at them.)

@socialjusticemunchkin, you seem to be big on this

Okay so this is very much the æsthetic. Achieve voluntary redistribution of capital to reduce the problems of inequality without fucking up the markets. It matches intuitions about the modern economy: if I buy a Toyota I buy a car, if I buy a Tesla I buy a movement. Some parts of it are ones I’ve been looking into myself. It sounds suspiciously great superficially, as an abstract idea.

So the long game is obvious. But what’s the short one? What is the advantage of switching to a system with higher transaction fees and decaying money, if one isn’t in it for the ideology. What are the immediate incentives. Making early adopters filthy rich seems kind of assumed these days, so those who contribute to “catallaxy” early would seem to get a lot of rewards from it later on if it becomes big, but what else distinguishes this from the standard ponzi scheme. Bitcoin had 1) cheap 2) fast 3) unstoppable transactions in addition to the ponzi, but what does this one give in addition to a vague promise of a future revolution? I could see something like this being at least very experiment-worthy but there needs to be some other substance to it than “if everyone did this it would be awesome”, and I don’t see what is the thing that does it. A huge player in the field adopting it would give it momentum but why would it happen. That’s the part I’m not seeing.