1. Society is getting worse.
2. I'm really good at writing software.
3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society.
That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large:
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
It doesn't matter how good you are at software if you don't have a software problem. Many problems cannot effectively be transformed into software problems. Instead of continuing to search for our keys where the light is, we should be bringing the light to where we lost our keys. That means accepting that we have to get outside of our comfort zone and improve our non-software skills. (This does not mean immediately thinking "I'll write software to bring the light to where I lost my keys!")
It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.
The "battles" are shaping up to be fought the same way they were previously - regulations forcing big huge heavy disclaimers on financial products, cryptocoin-based or otherwise, that state that the returns stated are not actually guaranteed.
No, software can’t fix all of the institutional and political problems, but it can present a more efficient modern system that helps generate the political clout people will need on the battlefield. We have systemic problems and no they’re not all going to go away with better software. But we need catalysts that motivate people, win hearts, and pierce through the apathetic menagerie.
With 0 regulation and no recourse built into crypto, one poor soul lost 50.8 million in 900 bitcoins.
You're not going to replace people problems with tech. Period.
Sadly, there will always be people who benefit from misattribution of a people problem to tech.
You know what other kinds of regulations are onerous? Everything aviation related. Every corner of aviation. And yet we're not clamoring to deregulate aviation because the consequences are so clear and self-evident.
Regulations are generally there for a reason. If they aren't, they need to be amended, we don't need to make our own money, except for blackjack and hookers.
People don't think of the failing power of international sanctions.
The consequences of a fully de-regulated financial system will likely lead to more armed conflicts. That said, I agree that the political system is broken, but that's a problem of democracy.
[1]: https://www.alt-m.org/2021/07/06/the-fable-of-the-cats/
Aviation is a great example of this. Yes aviation in most of the developed world continues to be extremely safe and the regulations are largely written in blood, off the backs of many failed aviation experiments. But regulations _are_ stifling aircraft design and the FAA is trying to desperately figure out how to not calcify the industry without endangering people. Anything but your largest passenger movers are all either from the 1960s or just reruns of these '60s designs. Despite huge advances in sensor fidelity, reliability, and electronics process changes, the cost to certify a new aircraft design is so high that most aircraft makers don't bother and just coast on old designs that have already been approved and are mostly just grandfathered in designs. It's taking decades for leaded aviation fuel to be phased out because of the difficulty in iterating on engine designs due to above regulations. We could have been much farther along in aircraft energy efficiency, maybe even electrification, if these regulations weren't as onerous. (One could even make a case, though probably unsubstantiated, that had regulations not had this impact that aviation would be cleaner and would lead to lower pollution-based mortality, so a regulation that's _ensuring_ blood.) Experimental aviation and sport aviation regulations in the US are a direct response to this slowdown in innovation and I hope they pave the way for more lightweight regulatory out-valves in aviation.
Ham radio is another great example of a medium that is dying due to regulations. There's large restrictions on digital modes and encryption on multiple ham bands. Because of the internet then, Ham doesn't really offer anyone anything that they can't do on the internet, so most people these days just don't care. The regulations themselves are in place to make sure the spectrum allocated to amateurs isn't abused; allow encryption and commercial vendors will use Ham bands for their own private operations, and allowing too many digital modes could (but doesn't necessarily) increase the noise floor. That doesn't mean that regulation doesn't have a strangling effect on the medium as a whole.
It's important to remember that as technology improves, regulations may have to be rethought. I'm fully onboard with the idea that regulations need to work hand-in-hand with the market to produce desirable outcomes, but to deify regulations like this is much too coarse a filter for a complicated, nuanced issue like finance. It provides a nice fight with clearly delineated sides when you pit "regulation good" people against "regulation bad" people, but the truth is that regulations are complicated and IMO should be reevaluated in the face of change.
Depends what "good" means. Something interesting about disruption is it often starts out worse than the incumbent in every way except one key one which people see value in. The incumbent then doesn't see it as a threat because it's so much worse, until a critical mass of users who value the one better thing builds up and the incumbent is disrupted.
I'm a firm believer disruption of big tech will work that way. PeerTube is worse than YouTube in many ways, except that it's federated. Mastodon is harder to use than Twitter for the typical user. I believe in both of them because I believe the one thing they inarguably do better (putting power back in the hands of the people through federation) is sufficiently significant, especially as faith continues to erode in the status quo gatekeepers.
To value something is a choice. People are going to chose to value whichever network/token/whatever is actually worth switching to.
How in the world is DeFi supposed to help this? From my POV DeFi makes it worse (advertising funding can now be untraceable/unauditable).
But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely. And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or a bank custody over it.
When a server gives you something other than what you asked it for with the aim of altering your behavior, that's called malware. We tolerate it in the form of ads because there aren't good alternatives available. If DeFi can fund an alternative, internet advertising can go die in a fire.
This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why would they not?
This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads? Because the cable company gets more money.
Can companies live while just charging for their services? absolutely. Will a lot of companies try to add additional revenue flows anyways? Also yes. In theory a company could compete on a 'no ads' platform. In practice, industry after industry realizes that they can just make more money at the turn of a switch. DeFi doesn't fix that. The advertisers are still going to come calling with their checkbooks.
I grant that DeFi does have some potential for micropayments that are hard with traditional finance. That could help make some blogs and small things ad free. But my point is that making payments has not at all stopped ads from invading every other industry. TV ads are not because your purchase had too much finance overhead. The advertisers will still be there, checkbook in hand.
Consider gitcoin, for instance. Yeah, it processes payments, but more importantly it tracks developer reputation, user donations, and facilitates aggregate decision making (re: voting on how to spend the money).
Are you saying that eventually, the users will vote to have ads included in their open source software? I think not. It's only when somebody is able to exploit a privileged position as owner-of-the-medium that you get greed-driven service degradation like that. But we're learning how to build ownerless mediums. Whatever problems they have, I don't think they'll be the same-old middleman problems that we're used to.
Drives me batshit that amazon does this on Prime. Play the fucking film you bastards
The only thing that DeFi changes about this scenario is that it's going to get easier for me to pay the people who make the content available in the format that I prefer. When it's sufficiently mature, that'll mean paying the artists as well. It's just a shame that we're not there yet.
Those things still exist. Focusing only on digital advertising when ads are being pushed everywhere is missing the point.
If Web3 becomes popular, it frees the online tip jar from a particular platform (eg Patreon) and decentralizes it so anyone can set it up for themselves, with far lower network effects required.
But... advertising isn't why these services trend towards angering content. Engagement is why. Whether you are paying with ad views or micropayments, if services want you to keep engaged then they will be incentivized to promote this kind of content. And since things like youtube premium (or whatever it is currently called) exist today and per-view payment systems have been set up by Google in the past (and already died), I don't think that funding these websites with BTC donations or whatever would change a thing.
If you think the firehose of self-referential click-bait needs to be made even more addictive, I'm really not sure what Web3 can offer.
OTOH, reintroducing the friction of having to decide whether the next click is worth your time and attention (i.e. money) is where it's at.
The proposed web3 model seems far more likely to be like those abusive micro-payment games with constant prompts to pay for something, with a page's worth of content moved behind successive paywalls since publishers aren't going to switch to a system which pays even less and you'd need to ask permission before charging someone.
This also adds problems with people who don't have money or aren't allowed to spend it (children, elderly, etc.) or the same scandals when those people are taken advantage of, not to mention the privacy impacts of effectively creating a super-cookie which can be used to track people all over the web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin
A neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for something.
"What have you lost, Mulla?"
"My key," said Nasrudin.
After a few minutes of searching, the other man said, "Where did you drop it?"
"At home."
"Then why, for heaven's sake, are you looking here?"
"There is more light here."
According to Shah, the German clown Karl Valentin (1882–1948) used to act the story out on stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_phil...
DeFi and crypto have already forced major changes to TradFi by exactly this mechanism, and they will continue to do so, even if DeFi doesn't succeed on its own terms.
Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact.
If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.
What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.
If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those.
It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.
And a lot of what governmental positions today are doing is processing files, basically mapping files to files. A lot of corruption stems from the fact that this mapping can be done outside of the law with nobody noticing. This can be fixed.
Q: How does an engineer cure constipation?
A: He works it out with a pencil.
Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that.
I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China.
Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart.
And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all.
So in 2021 the joke is:
Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation?
A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.
And I mean real laws, the ones written in congress.
Whatever we are doing, in a sense, is trying to sidestep these laws.
What I think you can say is that software has had many good effects in various ways for various members of society and many bad effects for various members. Those effects and members are sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.
There is no clear line between baby and bathwater. It's like trying to decide if iron or wheat has made society better or worse. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question.
A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
> A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
This is indeed a better question, and perhaps the best we can do in many situations. But we have plenty of systems where small changes have large secondary consequences or conversely small changes are just drowned out by the fact that the system is in some like of local minima
How is software making society worse?
Except for economic inequality and the climate.
More poor have been lifted out of poverty, but even so the gap between the richest and poorest is growing. That's a problem not just because it means the poorest could be doing even better than they are, but because inequality is itself a massively destabilizing force that undermines trust and weakens the social fabric.
Our air and water is OK to consume, and the amount of forest cover in Western countries is currently alright. But the diversity and density of natural life, especially animal life, is plummeting. We are living in a Silent Spring right now but it snuck up so fast most of us didn't notice. I remember how loud the outdoors were when I saw a children. Insects buzzing, frogs croaking, fish splashing, rodents rustling. When I go into the woods these days, it looks mostly the same, but it's so much quieter.
Everything seems worse because the media is shouting everything negative to get your attention.
I just saw a bird eat some seed outside. I never see or hear anything like that on the news ever.
By fragmenting the cognitive capacities of regular human beings.
By letting hatred and insanity reach a global audience.
By diverting countless person-hours of intelligent labor towards largely useless endeavours.
By becoming an opaque intermediary to an increasing fraction of all social interactions.
If we're talking about a material object, there would be a more or less clear distinction between "what it is", "how it's made", "how it's used", etc.
If we're talking about software, I don't think that's the case any more.
I think the system is whack, and that's the reason people don't want to fight it. They've given up.
Loosely speaking. Software in a computer, or in our brains.
With the "software in a computer" camp ascending rapidly, at the expense of the only alternative "software in a brain".
So we already need to solve all these problems with software soon. Or with a large amount of software as a required ingredient, anyway.
(I realize some people don't think machines will ever outthink biology (for ... hands and head waving around ... "Reasons! Man. Reasons!"). But, most of us probably agree that this is a loose goose first approximation of the long term trend we are in since the transistor, with no end in sight.)
Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights.
Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.
It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America back on that front. At this point it's clear that the people who stoked that anger and fear over decades no longer have control of how to direct it (if they ever did).
It's mind boggling how some people see eye watering profits and political donations and think that the whole thing is driven by stupidity.
>Now I will say that some of the individual stories—I mean, one story that jumps out at me was I was doing interviews about the Affordable Care Act, and I was interviewing very, very medically ill white men who really would have benefited—this is in Tennessee, and in other places in the South where they didn’t expand the Medicaid, they didn’t create the competitive insurance marketplaces—and I said like, “Hey, you guys are dying because you don’t have healthcare. Why don’t you get down with the Affordable Care Act? What’s your reason?”
>And I would say a number of people told me things like, one man told me, “There’s no way I’m supporting a system that would benefit,” as he said, “Mexicans and welfare queens,”—like total racist stereotypes. And so, even though he would have benefited—and his guy, ultimately over the three years of interviews, he passed away because he didn’t have medical care—so he was literally willing to die rather than sign up for a program that he thought was gonna benefit immigrants.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness [1] https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/jonathan-metzl/
It’s not him being a racist if he genuinely thought that the program would benefit immigrants and not benefit him.
How does your racism cause you to equate welfare Queen with black woman? I’d have thought that was more connected to the media using it that way.
1. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistak...
What is not so clear is why the person I was responding to thinks it’s their racism that causes them to think of those images, and not just that they have been exposed to Reagan’s imagery through the media.
So indeed I think your personal racism is not a simple function of exposure.
I’m sorry you personally have been a victim of racism exposure, and have become a passive racist as a consequence. It is a shame that society has done this to you.
We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincentives?
Maybe its the armchair libertarian in me, but it seems like we should just remove any formal definition of marriage from the government and instead normalize more power of attorney style actions.
First it’s a default mechanism for saying things like “if I get hurt this person can come see me in / ask questions about me in the hospital”. Also “we have joint economic activity so friction should be removed”.
Second, kids can’t necessarily articulate for themselves so it’s a default way of saying “here’s a couple of people who are helping me and others can be disregarded by default”
And it acts as a dash pot for both entering into and especially leaving these set of default rights and obligations.
* Marriage should be universally available. I’ve never liked saying that I “supported gay marriage” — the correct phrase is that “I want us to stop discriminating against people in the case of marriage”
This is essentially the power of attorney portion of my post. Perhaps it would be more inclusive if we just had a way to grant certain checkboxes and options to certain individuals. eg I could grant financial decisions to my mother, friend, cousin, and could even give a time limited grant to a girlfriend like "For the next year you can make life and death medical decisions for me" or whatever.
Sadly i dont see it happening because our government is so archaic
We haven't really codified the religious practice so much as codified the civil law assumptions around it.
It is weird in many ways, and it is the most complicated (and misunderstood) contract that many/most people will execute in their lives and it's done very implicitly.
On the other hand, if you didn't have the contractual side of marriage standardized, a whole other can of worms gets opened. If we didn't have a "standard contract" there are a crapton of things you would have to deal with individually.
Before gay marriage, some same-sex couples worked pretty hard to try and get as close to the marriage contracts as they could through contracts, which as I understand it was pretty expensive (5 figures typically) and ultimately not entirely successful especially as there are other implicit aspects that run counter to it.
The religious part of marriage is entirely optional.
Just because we used to regulate these ideas with religion in the past doesn't mean that our current institutions are religious. Some people who are legally married also subscribe to religious meanings of marriage. Some people who have food handlers cards also follow religious food customs. They're related but independent concepts in the modern day. The modern legal construct of marriage in the US is secular.
Now, would anyone ever check? Nah. Unless litigation (divorce, inheritance, whatever) came up and someone thought invalidating the original marriage might somehow help their case, though even then, dunno if it'd really matter.
The really interesting thing is that marriage is a contract that changes over time (as the government modifies law), without either party re-consenting to the new agreement. It's part of why I will probably never get married, it technically represents infinite risk.
a) Prenuptial agreements help some.
b) I hope your partner doesn't have a different view of what it represents.
c) this is actually a real interesting perspective I haven't heard. You're absolutely right and (like many things) the government could pass a law changing what it means, and who knows the affect. Actually, basically everything ever can change with government law changes (eg. taxes?) so maybe this isn't profound.
This can also happen time with non-marriage contracts, which is why prudent drafters include severability clauses
yes, but we dont get to draft the law/contract that is marriage -- that's done by law makers. IIRC even a pre/postnup cannot contradict law.
How much do you think it should cost a couple to form the contract for their marriage? Even a proper review of a contract with that complexity will likely cost a thousand or two, let alone making modifications. Times two, of course, as you would need independent representation.
I imagine that if we actually did this, fairly standard versions would start floating around and drop the costs - but the worst case of this is essentially the status quo with a few hundred in legal fees for review & education. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be terrible as it would reduce the amount of surprise in divorce.
On the other hand, it only really works in one jurisdiction so still problematic.
The government is not involved at the time of contract formation, there's not some government representative reviewing the contract. Nor do they enforce contracts (and related regulations) until there's a dispute.
Sure it does, depending on what the contract is about, even between individuals -- at least in most countries: A sale of real estate isn't really done until the deed is properly registered with the appropriate authorities. (I'm guessing this goes even for [at least most of] the otherwise so often wildly different USA.)
Marriage works the exact same way (again, at least in most of the world), and for the exact same reason(s): It only comes into force once properly registered, because it affects not only the parties and the relationship between them, but their relationship to government and the rest of society. For married people, taxation may change if the authorities know they're married; for property owners, they're the ones that can have others arrested for trespassing instead of themselves being arrested for it if the authorities know they're the owner.
That's pretty much how it has to work, otherwise it can't work at all. Isn't that rather obvious?
Given that 'marriage' nowadays has nothing to do with family formation, it makes sense for the State to get out of that business.
Or just look at it the other (and IMO more correct) way around: It's actually family formation that is "marriage".
This truth used to be recognised by governments too, as witnessed by the ancient legal term "common law marriage".
If it's time for anyone to "get out of that business", it's everyone but the state.
Some countries handle marriage as a religious thing. Israel works that way, and it's really complicated.
I, of course, agree with you in principle. However much of the controversy is around the religious aspect -- ie some religions have a narrow definition of marriage which we've codified into law.
part of me wonders if it would be smarter for us to cede the terminology to the religious and just remove "marriage" as a term from the government and instead normalize another term, perhaps but not necessarily "civic partnership". Once we recognize the part that government should be involved with we can start to remove all religious connotations because it's not the <term> that we're "attacking".
Christians want to say marriage is exactly a man and woman w/ a clergyman ? Fine they can do that inside their building because that's not a legal thing. But if a Christian wants to say "civic partnership" is a specific thing, well that's too bad because they dont get to define law (at least not directly).
(That's actually how it works, AFAIK, in traditionally deeply Catholic but legally wholly secular France: People "get married" twice. Once [usually first, AIUI] legally at the magistrate, and [then] optionally also in church, by a priest. But the latter is only "for show" -- for any deeply religious mothers and aunts who think that's "the real deal"; and, at a guess, in no small part to give the bride the grand show she's always been dreaming about.)
This is exactly the junior developer mindset described in the thread parent: restoring equal rights to gay people is a problem but first let's spin our wheels inventing a different terminology and taxonomy for marriage and upending legal precedent and existing case law about marriage.
it is both equal rights if "everyone/anyone can get married" or "no one can because it's not defined" (in the eyes of the government).
If people aren't willing to accept the 2nd case then I'm guessing they dont actually want equal rights so much as public(governmental) recognition of their status.
This is cutting the proverbial baby in half and redefining the legal institution so no one gets what they want, that will go well in a democracy /s
I should be able to extend the same set of privileges (like can make decisions for me if I am unable to) to my grandmother, or roommate, neighbor, priest, or whomever I choose. It makes little sense how we've constrained the solution w/o adding any value by those constraints. This maybe just the software engineer in me, but we've codified the concrete instead of the abstraction.
This is actually something of high importance to single people too -- something like 30-40% of households are single person and do not have a simple way to elect a person who can make legal decisions for them besides a relatively expensive and difficult power of attorney... So I see it as win:win:win to distill todays "marriage" into a legal common ground and give that right to _all_ people. Then anyone, gay or otherwise, can claim "marriage" because there will not be a legal definition (kind of like "natural" in food labelling). Christians wont be able to claim a monopoly on an undefined term.
But your idea of a win-win compromise is "let's expand it even further so I can include not just same-sex couples, but my grandmother or random roommate too"?
Of course it's about monogamy. Of course it's about who you have sex with. Why do you think we have laws around adultery and divorce? Our democracy wanted to govern adultery and divorce so much that it enshrined it into law, but also lol it should be easy to get support for repealing the whole thing because I don't think it makes sense /s
Fight for it if you wish, I think this can of worms is just about the furthest thing from a politically & legally pragmatic solution that you could possibly come up with in a Western democracy like majority Christian USA.
I'm reading your "software engineer" description of concrete vs abstraction as if that's remotely relevant to the law & politics of helping gays rightfully access a beneficial institution and I'm just thinking "holy shit if this is kind of attitude that crypto folks promise to bring into the political institution of finance, PLEASE KEEP THEM AWAY FROM IT".
The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person for their contextual meaning -- which is the only globally true usage of "marriage" -- marriage hasn't meant exactly one woman and one man in a literal monogamous pairing in basically any culture. Even in America it's at best serial monogamy. This would nullify the christian argument that we have to stop X group from "marriage" because it wouldn't be about _that_ anymore, by removing the terminology and insinuations they're concerned about it would become no different than a license to drive and afaik there aren't any christians arguing to remove drivers' licenses from X groups.
Anyways I cant help but feel like there is a lot of bad faith or miscommunication happening here, time will tell how it all get's solved, I do think we'll land on something that gives all groups of people a governmentally recognized status which gives basically powers of attorney and maybe financial responsibility (alimony)
I don't think you misrepresented yourself, nor that I misunderstood what you meant.
> The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person...
But I do think that's a bad idea. Language belongs to everyone, not any religion. If they want their own separate word for a societal concept that has no basis in any religion, let them come up with their own new word for it. Marriage existed long before Christianity or Islam, and I'd guess before Judaism too. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were married, weren't they? And I doubt even they came up with the idea. But society, and probably even "government" of some kind, existed even then. In fact, AFAICS at least "society" must have -- the whole idea of marriage makes no sense except in relation to the rest of society: "We're in a long-term exclusive relationship; please treat us, in many respects, as a single unit." If a couple are the only two people in existence, it makes no difference if they're "married" or not; it only starts to matter if there are other people around.
To extend the message I usually advocate giving to religionists: Just as you keep your pecker in your pants and out of my wife, you should keep your sexual mores in your bedroom and out of mine; your faith in your church and out of society as a whole; and [new addition] your ideas about marriage among yourselves and out of everyone else's language.
Who the fuck do those nutjobs think they "are,* to decide what everyone else understands as "marriage"? And why do you advocate ceding this power over what separates Man from the rest of the animals, namely language, to them?
Then you haven't understood anything -- at least not about marriage -- at all.
> we have have codified that one religious practice into our government
It's the exact other way around: Marriage is a social / societal thing, i.e. exactly what government is all about. Religion -- perhaps particularly Christianity -- has co-opted it, but certainly didn't invent it.
> libertarian
Yeah, that explains it.
I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You can get into politics, but the forces that broke the current set of politicians will break you as well. You can try and win from within the system, but that entails doing exactly what you're against.
I want to write software, man. I like making the computer do stuff, and I also like it when that stuff is socially meaningful, but it's impossible. The set of incentives and rules we have set up means that I don't get to do that. I don't enjoy knowing that the people i rely on are treated like fungible garbage. In that light I understand how it can seem appealing to change the world by writing software. I just don't think it's going to happen.