Welcome back dear friend. I hope you've been well.
After the altruistic response to the last article a thought popped to mind. Enthused with a little bit of cryptographic encouragement, the urge to sit down with a cup of coffe and go on a ram-ble-age (rampage + ramble = ramblage - It works better with tonal inflection) came a lot more naturally this time around.
Thank you dear stranger for your support. In return, here is a piece of art I created to celebrate your generosity:
Unfortunately it isn't an NFT. Though you know who you are, and if you print it and hang it in your replica work cubicle that you had installed in your home, you can honestly tell people that it was made for you (even if it hasn't got an ERC-721 code thingy). Your colleagues will be über jealous of your awesome video-chat background!
PROBLEM 4: Too few cooks in the kitchen
Why is the world of billions of connected nodes more appealing than the world of a few intimately connected ones?
Surely at any scale, there are proportionally as many artists, doctors or potential friends in your town as are in your country, as are on your continent, as in the world. Homogeneity dictates that at a large enough scale things become uniformly distributed, and the more unique and complicated a system, the smaller its scale compared to the rest of the universe. A graviton has a friend no matter where it decides to go, but if you happen to be one of the 887 Easter island heads, venturing away from home on an exploratory mission to find and document similar beings in far away lands may be a futile effort.
Luckily for humans, there are 7.8 billion other humans on the planet, so at scale, we have everything and everyone we could possibly ever want, connected at all times through myriad technologies.
However, I'm a bit dim witted and easily overwhelmed in large social settings. I can barely handle the petty politics of my 887 fellow islanders. Like, only yesterday Barbara gave me the cold shoulder because I didn't complement her seaweed necklace. The igneous b**ch! So maybe I am doomed to just stay on my island and give up on my quest to go out into the world and find someone to support my creative endeavours.
Luckily even for someone like me, some bloke called Dunbar has a number that could provide a solution. Dunbar's number is 150, which is the sum of eight consecutive prime numbers; 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31. Dunbar also claims that 150 people is the upper limit to a sustainable tribe of people.
It also happens to be the total number of collectible Power Stars in Super Mario 64 DS. So this number has a lot going for it, and as far as I'm concerned is super credible.
So even at the infinitesimally small scale of intimate community compared to the wider world, 150 people is large enough to be sustainable! 150 people could also have a fair bit of diversity within it! Imagine being on the USS Enterprise, with a capacity of 150, floating through space. If your tooth were to start aching, there could definitely be a dentist on board. If you needed a hair cut, there might be a few hairdressers. Even if you wanted help shifting a couch, there would probably be a few people who were expert at couch-shifting. Cooking, cleaning, washing dishes... We'll the robots can handle that.
Point is that the natural size of a sustainable community as dictated by biology is large enough so it could have enough specialised entities within it to help anyone get a leg up.
So if you wanted make money writing, maybe the community bard would offer a few coins for your literature.
So why blog to the whole world? Surely we have everything we could ever need right on our doorstep (assuming you don't live in a cave up a mountain and haven't had time to install a door and associated step).
Why has an aeon of tribe focused evolution become obsolete? Why are there so few people who are willing and capable to support one another in local communities anymore? Why turn outward?
As someone who doesn't know a whole lot about anything, all I can do is speculate. Though Theodor, my fellow Easter Islander with the largest head, and therefore the smartest, agrees with me and thinks that anyone who doesn't is a big dum-dum.
In our never-ending quest to maximise efficiency in all aspect of life, we have inevitably consolidated all of our energy into a handful of entities.
Back in the heyday of agriculture, efficiency was practically at zero. It took a majority of the people to hoe and sing jolly work songs to satisfy the hunger of a nation. Today, with a tractor and a few capable people you can run a farm pretty well. In the future, with automated drones, who knows, maybe a few capable people can run all the farms of the entire world. The fact of the matter is that the condensed efficiency of a tractor has reduced the need for actual distributed flesh and blood beings to ineffectively farm. Smoke breaks and merry banter are not appreciated by the forces of optimisation.
This is arguably a good thing though. After all, every tractor need a few mechanics, designers, drivers, and someone to hang furry dice and paint flames on it. So we as people just diversified into areas where efficiency is still best achieved by using people. And diversity might lead to finding a job that better suits an individual.
YAY!
However, the same principles apply. Efficiency slowly coalesces in fewer and fewer people as the system encroaches on being optimal, to the point where the event horizon is reached and the probability of having a tractor mechanic, designer, driver or dice man in your tribe of 150 people is practically zero.
I don't think that people don't want to help each other out, it is that specialisation has made most people unable to help. You are either one of the lucky few who benefit the system, or you are not.
The service industry is increasingly becoming the largest employer of people (pre pandemic. Who knows what the new normal will be). The gig economy is a manifestation of having people who can't use their specialisation to do anything practically useful, resigned to inefficiently putting on a show of making a cup of coffee. The reason inefficiency is tolerated at costa is because it honestly doesn't matter. Nothing is being made, you are paying for a vacuous experience, where the cost of the beans and the cup is minuscule and as with live concerts, you are paying for the experience.
I love me a good cup of coffee in a cosy cafe, but working there isn't exactly the ticket to becoming an expert at anything apart from making leafy foam patterns to keep yourself entertained.
We increasingly live in communities where most people are baristas, of one sort or another. Highly educated, talented and motivated baristas (for the most part). Not to suggest that the life of a barista is a bad one, but if you try and break the mould by teaming up with a couple of like minded people to specialise in anything outside of serving coffee's, you might struggle to find them in your community of 150 baristas.
Better expand your net and see if you can't increase your chances of finding someone in a population of 7.8 billion.
Goodbye Easter Island, hello www.world.com.
PROBLEM 5: No No Nodes
Are there any drawbacks to using the digital realm to connect with people?
Well, urm, yes. I won't patronise you by explaining that emojis don't make a good substitute for real communication. Though I grant you that receiving a poop emoji is more pleasant than having faeces deposited in your letter box. Guess it cuts both ways now that I think about it... Though that doesn't help me write this next section, sooo, I might just ignore that for now :)
So 7.8 billion nodes are all connected with super duper fast wifi, 24/7, all day every day. Why does it still feel like though you can find like minded people more easily than ever before, getting together and making stuff happen is nearly impossible. What explains these drawbacks of connectivity? Unless you are a twitch streamer or only-fans presenter, it seems like we are doomed never to practically help each other by sharing our expertease.
Well, I don't know to be honest. But Theodore has some thoughts on the matter. He's been pensively staring into the middle distance for ages no, so he's probably thought this through pretty well.
I don't think it's controversial to say that the rich have gotten richer relative to the rest of the population. No hard feelings, but this fact must emirate from somewhere. I don't think that people are working all that much harder for their bonuses today than they were thirty years ago.
Tax dodging and all that aside, why does there seem to be a wealth transfer mechanism in our society that benefits the people at the top? And can I not find a viable partner in crime because the internet isn't working with my best interests at heart?
Connecting 7.8 billion people is inherently a bloated ordeal. The system is so large that it becomes inflexible, slow to adapt, and in an effort to include everyone, not very nuanced. Look at twitter, where limits on character count are imposed to streamline the system at the cost of expression.
In a system that is not very adaptable, a few little quirks can build over time till they are worn into the fabric of the system like a cancer.
A small brook on the planes of the Savannah can be diverted with a well placed boulder. This brooked if left unchecked however, will wear a groove so deep and wide that you would need a colossal dam to have any influence on it.
On the internet these same grooves exist. Some of them are colossal canyons, so effective at transferring wealth that Netflix can make Blockbuster Video go extinct in an instant. And what can one person do, even when they are boulder sized like Theodore to change the status quo? Not a lot unfortunately.
Money flows like water through the spongy tendrils of the virtual world, and that seems pretty inevitable. Since the dawn of society however we have had a solution. Simple wealth transfer checks and balances have always been in place. Whether the wealth simply gets put back in the bottom to flow back up, or regulation to block some channels exist, or laws to disincentives use of other channels are put in place, mechanisms to try and make a reasonably fair system do exist.
And these wealth transfer mechanisms have been in place in some form since the early agricultural days of our species, so plenty of time thinking about what to do about it has been done. We don't need to re-invent the wheel here I don't think.
So why, if we have mechanisms to control these channels, are the owners of these channels getting disproportionately rich today? Why is the wealth divide larger than it has been since the time when one person with a bone through his nose was considered a god? And why can I not get a leg up in the new internet tribe?
Well, the important word is growth. Growth of the super interwoven digital economy is ever important as people have basically become productively useless. A politician can no longer grow an economy by incentivising people to be effective in producing useful output. So in a final Hail Mary to make nations wealthy, tech firms and service providers are the only place where throwing money into the economy may lead to having dominance over some part of the digital realm. Facebook is worth 720 billion dollars and employs only 50000. That's an insanely efficient wealth concentration mechanism. And unbelievably, thats 90 odd dollars per person on this planet that Facebook has managed to siphon into its and its shareholders coffers. You can see why it is tempting to back this horse over Mom and Pop's Li'll old bakery.
What is good for the economy is good for the people after all, think the politicians who have the power to transfer wealth. This is true unless you don't actually contribute to that economy and therefore don't get rewarded for your 9 to 5 sacrifice. You don't benefit very much if you don't own a piece of the ever growing pie. If you are using Facebook to connect with people, you are rewarded with a few crumbs to efficiently maximise the green lines steady march upwards. And you definitely won't use Facebook to bring friends together to create your own money transfer system as that goes against your service providers best interests. If you're lucky, you'll get bought by facebook and merge with them.
The insane amounts of money that have been deployed to stimulate our economy have all flowed through these channels, deepening them un-naturally quickly, and supplying exorbitant amount of wealth to the Jack, Jeff, Mark and Elons of the world.
The more money you pump into an economy, the better the mechanisms for turning this free money into free profits will be created (especially when you just give the money directly to the wealthy. They don't even have to be inventive to get access to it!).
And a system with 7.8 billion nodes can have much larger grooves than a system of 520 million interdependent yet autonomous tribes.
So good luck trying to find a specialised expert in your tribe of 150, and good luck competing against facebook to get your new digital tribe of specialised experts to carve out your own slice of the digital pie.
Pfew! God I really gave myself a headache there. I definitely need a frappe-macchiato now.
If you made it through that jumbled mess, well done and thank you for taking the time to read the article. I hope it was at least somewhat coherent in parts and your stopping by is hugely appreciated.
And please do be optimistic, a few good friends and maybe a couple of people reading your blog is all that you need to get by. And when the game is eventually changed, as with trends in fashion, a new set of rules will exist to give you a chance to prove your worth.
Sooner or later balance will be restored, and maybe you can get a leg up by following your principles, and trusting in yourself to do the right thing.
I'm just here to spout my mouth, and not tell you what to do. But cryptocurrencies seem to be a good hedge till everyone regains their sanity.
Thank you again for giving me your time.
Kindest regards,
b.
