From the Printing Press to Broadcast to Internet—Information technology has always radically reshaped society, politics, and economics. Let's see if we can peer into the future of blockchain.
Yes, I often think also about the Hierarchies of Expertise now available as a result. Where specific psychographics are now specifically targeted to distribute a specific narrative, perspective, or message that is often echoed without the end consumer even understanding the underlying tactic or the beneficiary of the memetic.
Things are about to get a lot more complicated in the (Info-sphere).
Kudos David Shapiro for this nothing short of brilliant article, totally congruent with what Marshall McLuhan might have written, had he been alive in the Age of AI. Homo Sapiens can indeed be seen as - not merely the midwife-but the very reproductive organs for the Creation of Exocortex or Cognosphere of Humanity within the abstract universe which o1 preferers to call ” Intelliverse”. It seems the endothermic/exothermic processes of Thermodynamics also basically apply in abstract mode. This bodes well for AI cross-discipline Innovation Automation, which could indeed indicate the latent potential space for speeding up the creation of Exocortex.
This article sparked a lengthy dialogue with AI about fragmented identity and the role of context in making sense of who people are.
I kept coming back to how much context is required to interpret even simple facts about others. Imagine two towns connected by radio. In the first town, the locals talk about their lives together—what happened yesterday, what’s planned for tomorrow, and who can be counted on for what. They share the same weather, the same calendar, and a shared understanding of their mayor, Bob.
Now, say the first town mentions to the second that Bob, their mayor, was drunk yesterday. The second town, lacking context, might assume, "They elected a drunkard as their mayor?" What they don’t know is that Bob only drinks once a year—on the anniversary of his partner’s death. Without that deeper context, the second town comes away with a distorted, incomplete picture.
This feels relevant to how blockchain entries construct records. The ledger might be immutable and transparent, but its entries are context-blind. Like the second town’s misunderstanding of Bob, even a many-faceted blockchain “truth” will inevitably flatten complex human stories. Without some form of cognitive or social lubrication—mechanisms for handling ambiguity, context gaps, and narrative reconciliation—the edges of those flattened facets will remain sharp enough to draw blood.
Tools more advanced than etherscan[.]io and mempool[.]space exist and will improve to help end users determine credible and consistent facts that are etched into the ledgers that matter most to them.
I like your examples, and if I was to attempt to add one of my own, it would be of owning several houses, but one of them (for this story) in between two neighbors where one neighbor behaves in a way you approve of, the other neighbor behaves in a way you disapprove of, but the three of you all own glass houses in a specific experimental development where everyone in the neighborhood owns glass houses.
These example houses would be impractical for many applications, but 100% of the business conducted there is known to be true — appealing only to those who understand and value those precise truths for what they are and why those precise truths are harbored in those exact locations.
One glass house on its own is mildly interesting, but a neighborhood of them forms a unique network that is impossible to entirely categorize or wholly summarize without owning a house in that neighborhood and having firsthand experience with the neighbors who made the common choice to own some real estate there — like a unique “Ledger HOA” that generates value instead of siphoning it.
We already live in a kind of "glass house" society, though the rules aren’t evenly applied—and that’s one of the deep vulnerabilities we need to address. (Me, I've no real clue how to do that, yet.)
Consider how HR departments treat social media profiles. I could show up at a job interview wearing a suit, with a polished resume and solid references—but if a hiring manager sees me on social media after a raucous party, that image might overshadow everything else. Or, more pointedly for me, my social media could show photos of me after a BDSM scene—bite marks, rope scars, welts—completely consensual, adult experiences shared among adults. How many jobs would silently disappear because hiring managers can see into my glass house?
Or imagine I’m a teacher, and my social media shows me having drinks with friends. Parents—many of whom also drink with friends—might have a meltdown, selectively applying outrage because they aren’t being watched in return. Their glass houses remain unexamined.
There’s endless advice about scrubbing social media, avoiding “reputation-damaging” posts, and managing online appearances—as if nobody else lives in a glass house, despite the obvious reality that we all do. The only difference is whose transparency gets weaponized—and by whom.
It makes me think that, unlike actual real estate (where value is determined greatly in part by finite physical space limitations), “digital real estate” values will be determined more by how effectively select pieces of key data can be separated from each other and grouped together in many useful ways yet to be fully imagined.
I have my own ideas (mostly art and individual ASI training data) about how future value will consolidate in a hypothetical world where every human’s basic needs are met, and I take solace in the fact that even if my ideas happen to be further from the truth than I anticipate, those ideas are published on top of money (Bitcoin), and will never be worth less than the ledger that contains them (which continues to rise exponentially with more adoption and more technological ideas built on top of the ledger itself).
You got it man. Well done. Narratives are EVERYTHING. We literally do not comprehend reality without our narratives, and that includes ourselves. It's all stories, all the way down.
In my conversation with the AI, I used the term and concept of "universal parasocialism."
Parasocial relationships are when we attach meaning to a relationship with somebody who doesn't know us (a podcast host, famous actor, radio personality, etc). But if I'm in a chatroom with a bunch of strangers, any sense of intimacy or close relationship is probably parasocial, too: we can scarcely be said to know each other from a few dozen lines of text shared back and forth.
And considering how difficult it is to be significantly self-aware, and how much harder it can be to know another person very well, there's a way in which every pairing of people constitutes a complex skein of parasocial relationships. Masks, failures of communication, projection, bias, prejudice... way too many things get in the way of objectivity.
Great article. Reflecting upon both the good and the bad is critical to understanding how this will play out. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
Awesome article considering both the good and the gory. Combined with something else I heard (I think you said), you could say that AI is the digitized representation of the collective consciousness of civilization - exocortex - becoming self-aware.
Only issue is this particular article reads too heavily Claudey. Though its 'thoughts' are as apposite as ever!
Many skepticisms about Distributed Ledger Technology stem from how removed or insulated a person’s ideas about truth can be from their understandings of history and structural frameworks.
As you stated, “Blockchain ensures transparency becomes a mathematical precondition rather than an institutional preference.”
Corruption prefers manipulative biases over fair conditions.
Yes, I often think also about the Hierarchies of Expertise now available as a result. Where specific psychographics are now specifically targeted to distribute a specific narrative, perspective, or message that is often echoed without the end consumer even understanding the underlying tactic or the beneficiary of the memetic.
Things are about to get a lot more complicated in the (Info-sphere).
Kudos David Shapiro for this nothing short of brilliant article, totally congruent with what Marshall McLuhan might have written, had he been alive in the Age of AI. Homo Sapiens can indeed be seen as - not merely the midwife-but the very reproductive organs for the Creation of Exocortex or Cognosphere of Humanity within the abstract universe which o1 preferers to call ” Intelliverse”. It seems the endothermic/exothermic processes of Thermodynamics also basically apply in abstract mode. This bodes well for AI cross-discipline Innovation Automation, which could indeed indicate the latent potential space for speeding up the creation of Exocortex.
Damn, you are a talented writer
Excellent article. Well-written, potent, and timely.
This article sparked a lengthy dialogue with AI about fragmented identity and the role of context in making sense of who people are.
I kept coming back to how much context is required to interpret even simple facts about others. Imagine two towns connected by radio. In the first town, the locals talk about their lives together—what happened yesterday, what’s planned for tomorrow, and who can be counted on for what. They share the same weather, the same calendar, and a shared understanding of their mayor, Bob.
Now, say the first town mentions to the second that Bob, their mayor, was drunk yesterday. The second town, lacking context, might assume, "They elected a drunkard as their mayor?" What they don’t know is that Bob only drinks once a year—on the anniversary of his partner’s death. Without that deeper context, the second town comes away with a distorted, incomplete picture.
This feels relevant to how blockchain entries construct records. The ledger might be immutable and transparent, but its entries are context-blind. Like the second town’s misunderstanding of Bob, even a many-faceted blockchain “truth” will inevitably flatten complex human stories. Without some form of cognitive or social lubrication—mechanisms for handling ambiguity, context gaps, and narrative reconciliation—the edges of those flattened facets will remain sharp enough to draw blood.
Tools more advanced than etherscan[.]io and mempool[.]space exist and will improve to help end users determine credible and consistent facts that are etched into the ledgers that matter most to them.
I like your examples, and if I was to attempt to add one of my own, it would be of owning several houses, but one of them (for this story) in between two neighbors where one neighbor behaves in a way you approve of, the other neighbor behaves in a way you disapprove of, but the three of you all own glass houses in a specific experimental development where everyone in the neighborhood owns glass houses.
These example houses would be impractical for many applications, but 100% of the business conducted there is known to be true — appealing only to those who understand and value those precise truths for what they are and why those precise truths are harbored in those exact locations.
One glass house on its own is mildly interesting, but a neighborhood of them forms a unique network that is impossible to entirely categorize or wholly summarize without owning a house in that neighborhood and having firsthand experience with the neighbors who made the common choice to own some real estate there — like a unique “Ledger HOA” that generates value instead of siphoning it.
We already live in a kind of "glass house" society, though the rules aren’t evenly applied—and that’s one of the deep vulnerabilities we need to address. (Me, I've no real clue how to do that, yet.)
Consider how HR departments treat social media profiles. I could show up at a job interview wearing a suit, with a polished resume and solid references—but if a hiring manager sees me on social media after a raucous party, that image might overshadow everything else. Or, more pointedly for me, my social media could show photos of me after a BDSM scene—bite marks, rope scars, welts—completely consensual, adult experiences shared among adults. How many jobs would silently disappear because hiring managers can see into my glass house?
Or imagine I’m a teacher, and my social media shows me having drinks with friends. Parents—many of whom also drink with friends—might have a meltdown, selectively applying outrage because they aren’t being watched in return. Their glass houses remain unexamined.
There’s endless advice about scrubbing social media, avoiding “reputation-damaging” posts, and managing online appearances—as if nobody else lives in a glass house, despite the obvious reality that we all do. The only difference is whose transparency gets weaponized—and by whom.
All very valid points and examples. Very.
It makes me think that, unlike actual real estate (where value is determined greatly in part by finite physical space limitations), “digital real estate” values will be determined more by how effectively select pieces of key data can be separated from each other and grouped together in many useful ways yet to be fully imagined.
I have my own ideas (mostly art and individual ASI training data) about how future value will consolidate in a hypothetical world where every human’s basic needs are met, and I take solace in the fact that even if my ideas happen to be further from the truth than I anticipate, those ideas are published on top of money (Bitcoin), and will never be worth less than the ledger that contains them (which continues to rise exponentially with more adoption and more technological ideas built on top of the ledger itself).
You got it man. Well done. Narratives are EVERYTHING. We literally do not comprehend reality without our narratives, and that includes ourselves. It's all stories, all the way down.
In my conversation with the AI, I used the term and concept of "universal parasocialism."
Parasocial relationships are when we attach meaning to a relationship with somebody who doesn't know us (a podcast host, famous actor, radio personality, etc). But if I'm in a chatroom with a bunch of strangers, any sense of intimacy or close relationship is probably parasocial, too: we can scarcely be said to know each other from a few dozen lines of text shared back and forth.
And considering how difficult it is to be significantly self-aware, and how much harder it can be to know another person very well, there's a way in which every pairing of people constitutes a complex skein of parasocial relationships. Masks, failures of communication, projection, bias, prejudice... way too many things get in the way of objectivity.
As you say: it's all stories, all the way down.
Great article. Reflecting upon both the good and the bad is critical to understanding how this will play out. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
"The best way to predict the future is to build it"
Make it so!
Awesome article considering both the good and the gory. Combined with something else I heard (I think you said), you could say that AI is the digitized representation of the collective consciousness of civilization - exocortex - becoming self-aware.
Only issue is this particular article reads too heavily Claudey. Though its 'thoughts' are as apposite as ever!
Great article!
Many skepticisms about Distributed Ledger Technology stem from how removed or insulated a person’s ideas about truth can be from their understandings of history and structural frameworks.
As you stated, “Blockchain ensures transparency becomes a mathematical precondition rather than an institutional preference.”
Corruption prefers manipulative biases over fair conditions.
That quote crystallized this for me, too.