Carol Anne Cypherpunk
Back when the 6502 ran the AppleII, I met Carol Anne Cypherpunk. I have just listened a bit to the interview of Vitalik Buterin, and when he mentioned the Cypherpunks it brought back memories. Carol Anne was quite insistent I learn about PGP, Pretty Good Privacy. I didn't have much use for it, SSL and the like were beyond me, or my needs. I was hacking out a DMA circuit that relied on timing not drifting at all, which it would do. Oh, that poor company, that built their code on some 'Unpublished Op Codes'.
But along the way of learning what PGP was about, the concept and use of a shared secret caught my attention, and I have been meditating on the role of shared secrets in social organization.
A Shared Secret create a sort of club, and communication between members of the club is quite a bit different from that between outsiders. In physical society, these clubs ebb and flow at a relatively organic pace. But they are sort of meme patterns:
“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/what-defines-a-meme-1904778/
And as Jacques Monod, above says, they evolve. They have evolved to live within the social structure over thousands of years.
Think of NFT contracts and Meme-coins similarly as 'retaining some of the properties of organisms', and 'tending to perpetuate their own structure'. Then also they must be evolving, but much more rapidly than the physical ones, and with their reward function (to borrow from ML) much less weighted with the overall social good.
And then again, these Technical-Memes (TREMES) can be manipulated to some outside agencies agenda.
Today I attempted a cold call person to person bitcoin-cash exchange, explaining how the absence of any central authority required interpersonal contacts and cultivation of a web-of-trust.
