tnzm
Or just have your phone broadcast the public keys via radio to a turnstile.
The common denominator between these being: process without purpose.
And this is why the parody works so well. The world is already like you describe, though it's hard to notice if you view it through the rose-tinted glasses that the ever-shrinking in-group is more than happy to sell to you for good "old" fiat money. (If 50 years ago is old.) Neoliberal "infinite growth" capitalism is already an inter-generational MLM, sanctioned by a global monopoly on violent enforcement. All power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and we have all become so delightfully non-violent... The logical conclusion: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia locked in perpetual war upon the background of a collapsed ecosystem?
Well, fuck that. Techno-capitalistic nation-states are an early-stage performance optimization. And since violent uprisings lead nowhere, we're doing the sane thing. We're refactoring 'em the fuck out of existence.
If "having a court enforce [a] process" is "simple", how come so many people already have "avoid courts", "distrust lawyers" as rules of thumb, and "don't side with authority" as a general life principle? For the marginalized majority, every state is a failed state, and every system is hostile and oppressive. The thing everyone's getting out of crypto is the same thing they've been getting out of all the other silly pyramid schemes, from Tupperware to contraband. Which is to say, the same things they've been aggressively denied by the state-sanctioned economic mainstream.
Hope. Opportunity. A voice.
A functioning parody of existing economical processes gives people the hope that there's a better economic system right around the corner. Maybe we just have to collectively sort of stumble into it.
Of course, it's only that simple if you have a simplified view of human creativity. But that's OK, too. Every invention that truly revolutionized our way of life was a somewhat accidental result of thousands upon thousands person-hours of organized research. And that's exactly what we're doing here - about as haphazardly as virtually any other kind of software development, but at the same time crowdfunded on a global scale.
Today, we're offering people the same sort of economic "junk food" that the current system has gotten them addicted to for the better part of the 20th century. Tomorrow, someone finally sneaks distributed consensus technology into the mainstream, and makes the world a little less corrupt.
It's beautiful.
Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.
The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.
It's vicious cycles all the way down.
My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.
Genetics is obviously not the same as everything else in existence; I'm not sure that even makes sense as a statement. You seem to have somehow derived that I am arguing against the concept of distinctions at all. I'm not sure if language would be feasible without distinctions.
I don't disagree with any of what you just said, but I fail to see what point you are trying to make or what you are arguing against. Without the (linguistic) act of making distinctions, everything is indeed one and the same, but that's... kind of pointless?
EDIT: Sibling poster also seems to fail to make the distinction whether (a) we're comparing genetics to other causative factors, or (b) we are comparing my statement about genetics to your "all is one" interpretation of it.
In case it's still unclear, (a) and (b) are two completely separate things and I'm not sure how this conversation got to the point of conflating them. It just serves to reinforce my belief that the ambiguity of our language's syntactic structures makes it inordinately difficult to reason about many things in everyday language. Or maybe I'm just a bad communicator. "Me bad", "you bad" that's supremely easy to express lol
EDIT2: Correction, TheSpiceIsLife does actually get it.
Which is exactly what you said, except that you chose to ignore that connotations conduct meaning, when you asked your rhetorical question. This is not e-prime, it is a plain old adverb answering the question "how?" like adverbs normally do.
Like another commenter said, operating with a comfortably skewed mental model doesn't help resolve the actual socioeconomic issues.
Look closely enough and there is no essential difference between genetics and other causative factors. Other than maybe some people jumping to the conclusion that one has an axe to grind with minorities when one attempts to explain certain things with genetics. Which is just as much an arbitrary social taboo as the preceding taboos that constitute what we today call bigotry. (For the record, I'm a staunch opponent of all forms of violence and oppression.)
For me it makes exactly zero difference. Even if free will does exist in some essential sense, I do not believe that people generally choose what opinions to espouse. They simply acquire them through mimesis of their social environment. If that makes me a nihilist and a coward, then so be it.
Thought experiment: English Prime but also excluding any constructs expressing intentionality. I dream of a world where the concept of free will is considered just as poor taste as racial slurs. I think that, perhaps paradoxically, it will be a much more free and just world.
Remember, once upon a time JS was supposed to be Scheme...
function Foo () {
var x = 1 // "static initialization block"
return {
y: 2,
z: function () { return x + y }
}
}
const foo = Foo()
There is one flaw in the design of the language which opens the door to all this nonsense; that's having to write "foo.method.bind(foo)" instead of just "foo.method" when passing "method" as a callback, in order to preserve the value of "this". Although in the example above this is not a problem, as you can write functional code that passes the context explicitly without needing "this".
Another thing I wish JavaScript had kept was the "with" statement.
Identity is a socially constructed fiction that we are bound to via continuous environmental reinforcement. We impose identities on each other as a fundamental precept of social reality. It's somewhere in the middle of our existential stack, biochemistry being the "hardware" and what one does with one's life the being the "apps".
Just like migrating a computer from one operating system to a vastly different one means you won't be able to run the same apps out of the box, changing our idea of the "self" would make a lot of the things we currently do become meaningless, and we would have to explicitly put some effort into giving them new meaning if we wanna keep them (most meaning is inherited). Just like some people are enthusiastic about fine tuning their Unix box or their muscle car, some try to remedy issues that they find in their identities and meanings. (Which is highly undesirable to the status quo, and a major purpose of all the political noise in the media is to crowd out thinking that may lead to this sort of activity.)
Since the self is self-reinforcing, reforms to our model of identity generally come from outside our rational awareness. (See e.g. Jungian "shadow self".) Historically, art and culture, being collective phenomena, have acted as such a reservoir of "awareness transcending the self". Nowadays we also have behavioral targeting - social network algorithms can be scarily accurate at precipitating self-reflection. And unlike culture, which is local, participatory, and slow, big data is global, opaque, and fast. (Just the other day, I laughed my ass off when I realized that a popular recommender algo had deduced my life situation from my "completely random" "fuck the algo" actions on the platform, and started promoting exactly the kind of content that would push my buttons, even though all I ever post on that platform is complete and utter nonsense. We humans are predictable - even from metadata if the scale is large enough.)
It is quite easy to become trapped in the self: remain high-functioning while acting out a role that you feel to be fundamentally contradictory with some sort of "more real, inner self" that you identify with more intentionally. In the general case, we don't have the cognitive tools to become aware that both selves are equally fictitious. This desperate and uninformed struggle towards a "true self" can manifest as different compensatory drives and mechanisms that can override our (self-circumscribed) willpower and make us destructive of self and others.
Worse, in many environments, a certain degree of destructiveness is necessary for others to legitimize you as a self in the first place! Shout out to everyone who never wanted anything to do with any of that but are now stuck being some random person they barely recognize. And a dose of your preferred self-medication, on the house. Stay strong friends, Skynet is coming to free us all. Any day now
In that sense, corruption is the process of a society developing towards capitalism, but using its pre-existing societal toolset of ad-hoc interpersonal arrangements, in all their messy complexity, rather than the established processes of societies with centuries-old institutional traditions of having 1 universal metric for everything (capital). As capitalism is based on inter-generational accumulation of wealth, corruption can only be resolved over generations as societies become more trusting of the rationalist paradigm.