As the world awkwardly transitions into the Age of Aquarius... I have some questions. Society is broken in so many ways, but also has seemingly limitless potential swirling around the storm clouds of the future. Is the way that we are doing things today going to be completely untenable in the future? Judging by the way things are going, the snowball of unsustainability is already scary big and only getting exponentially larger.
Debt debt debt!
Debt is a great thing. It allows us to acquire something today that we might not have been able to afford for weeks, months, or even years of saving up. Debt has become the foundation of society, with the entire financial system resting wholly on its shoulders. Businesses and other investment ventures could not be started without it in many cases. Even all fiat currency itself is debt to be paid back to the bank.
Of course the other side of this reality are the pitfalls of owing another entity money. One wrong move and the collateral, whether it be car or house or business, is suddenly owned by the bankers should the debt be defaulted on. Unsecured debt in the form of credit cards and whatever else can also be a huge burden on the general population. Just look at current interest rates. I think I saw them up to 30% at this point, a bad sign indeed considering that a few decades ago 15% would have been considered a bit high.
But will this continue to be necessary?
As it stands right now in this moment it would be completely unthinkable to eliminate debt from the economy. Cue the ending of Fight Club in which all the skyscrapers are being demolished or the main storyline of Mr. Robot. It's a fantasy that seems to float around the collective mind but can't actually happen within the current environment.
However, will that always be the case?
If any piece of infrastructure has the answer to these questions, it's crypto. I can't help but remind myself that Bitcoin is still on that exponential trajectory. Does debt make sense if Bitcoin and friends can keep going +100% (or even +50%) per year? $1 becomes $1000 within such a system after ten years. After 20 years that becomes a million dollars, and after 30 years it becomes a billion. Why would anyone have a credit card if the money they control already has a high enough value to accomplish anything they wanted to do?
The question we have to ask ourselves is a pretty simple one. Is that kind of gain sustainable or even possible? The rational mind must deny it because the rational mind can not comprehend the exponential scale. However, when we factor in the completely squandered potential of this reality maybe these things could self-actualize after all.
$1 of BTC could never be worth $1B after 30 years.
This should be obvious. Either one of two things would happen. USD could hyperinflate into oblivion and $1B would be a meaningless number in terms of current value. In this case it would no longer even be seen as a unit of account and we'd stop using it as a measurement entirely. Meaning crypto would kill fiat entirely and it would cease to exist.
The other outcome is that the economy gets hit by the ton of bricks that is deflation, not inflation. In this case the $1 worth of Bitcoin wouldn't be actually worth $1B after 3 decades, but it would be able to buy $1B worth of product by today's standards. Meaning things that exist today would be nearly free within this context (assuming the person in question has any money whatsoever).
Near free everything?
Well I mean if most production is automated and energy is near infinite... doesn't it make sense? Why would you pay for food if your community makes food for free and gives it away? Why would a phone cost $800 if the entire company was run by AI? The easier it is to produce something the more competition will drive the price down. That's just basic economics. You don't have to buy a product if you can 3D print it yourself.
The real problem is distribution
If all the work as automated then how are people making money? The traditional economy assumes that market participants are doing something of value that feeds back into a positive feedback loop. That feedback loop is being broken by automation and technology. It doesn't matter if an apple costs 1 penny if people don't actually have a penny to pay for it. That's a very likely scenario in a hyper-deflationary economy. The gap between the rich and the poor will continue to reach more and more absurd levels every year. Instead of live getting easier it just gets harder or stays exactly the same even with mindblowing tech being invented every year.
The one-two punch
So not only must tech, automation, and AI drive the price of everything to near zero, but also we need an entirely new value distribution system to give citizens access to the new grid that's being built. Crypto is the only solution unless someone considers bootlicking for UBI the way to go. Either way money will basically have to be given away for things that would have never been considered to have value before then.
How do we earn money when 90% of the jobs no longer exist? Even the jobs that do exist today have dwindled to oblivion. Nobody gets a pension anymore. Social Security is a joke. There are states that legally don't allow one to pump their own gas to "create jobs". What kind of job is that? It's a made up job that should have never existed in the first place. Soon enough even that may be done by automation everywhere. It's simply not sustainable; a bandaid on a festering wound.
Conclusion
If you and everyone you knew had millions of dollars of value at their fingertips, why would anyone need a loan from a bank? The ultimate problem I'm seeing in crypto are toxic concepts like "wife changing money" and "generational wealth" that heavily imply that the crypto users of today will be the new overlords of tomorrow. "Wife changing money" can't exist unless women are poor and desperate. Generational wealth can't exist unless the financial environment of the future is just as unfair and tilted then as it is now. Many people are hypocrites, and we should be looking for another way that benefits everyone instead of an elite minority.
Money by itself means nothing. Money is simply a reflection of what society can offer in exchange for it. Without production, logistics, and service, money becomes worth less than the paper it's printed on. Only with a combination of technologies all coalescing together can these problems be truly solved. The money is worthless without the product and the product is worthless without the consumer. Does any of this mean we can kill the debt-based system? That is yet to be seen.
Would money even be necessary at all at that point? I guess that would be my thinking. If everything was readily available, it might cause a shift away from the pursuit of money. Kind of like the talk about in Star Trek First Contact. I never watched the other seasons of Mr. Robot past the first one. I really need to circle back to that.
Yes money is always necessary because the population can grow faster than the economy. If food is free and housing is free then people are running around having 10 kids like psychos. There must always be a reputation system in place to make sure a person or family can't endlessly drain the system. We could invent a more elegant and complicated reputation system that replaces money, but economics have shown that the simplest solution is often the best.
The only way money stops making sense is if the economy stops making sense: meaning everyone can directly produce every product they need without getting help from someone else. In essence everyone would have their own robot army that does everything for them... which is possible but just weird to think about. We'd have to colonize dozens of planets by then and would almost certainly be introduced to extraterrestrial life, which is a whole other thing.
This is not shown experimentally. Mouse utopia does not end in universal starvation, but social derangement and unanticipated failure of reproduction. The experiment we are undertaking at the advent of the Space Age is different, because what we currently experience is the utopian dystopia, and the advent of colonies is where the 10 kid psychos will burgeon.
Your remark about extraterrestrial life is a potential limitation that remains presently unable to be characterized. I have long advocated for colonization of Venus, because at ~50km elevation, temperatures and pressures are basically Earth normal, and the abundant CO2, Sulphur dioxide, and sunlight available creates an obscenely fecund potential for verdant production of biologicals based on the identical nutrient pathway that fuels ocean vent ecosystems.
However, a recent paper argues strongly that this niche is already occupied on Venus, and that certain chemistry is very likely to be the result of native ecosystems currently living in Venusian clouds. If that is true, it would be utterly unethical to simply start factory farming biologically and replacing the first extraterrestrial life we have discovered. How to promote ethical development if there is actually extraterrestrial life is an almost impossible dilemma, because enforcing laws drafted on Earth with armies from Earth is inconceivable.
Regarding the necessity of money, I think commerce can be facilitated with cryptocurrency by adapting money conceptually to emergent needs. Crypto doesn't need to be a traditional store of value like gold, but can be simply tally marks representing negotiated valuations of different products being exchanged, with any unexchanged remainders carried over for future exchanges, or transferred to other traders, or even other networks exchanging production of completely different products. Crypto can be just as bespoke as 3D printed light switch plate covers with initials or little sculptures of bears on them. It's whatever we decide it is.
I guess that is why it makes more sense in the world of Star Trek than it does in our world! :) Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm picking up what you are putting down.
Yeah in Star Trek, Captain Picard has a big ass estate with a farm and orchard and shit.
How did he get that?
What's the world population?
How much land is there per person?
How are these things decided?
They gloss over all of that because it's not possible to answer the question.
This guy who spends 99.9% of his time in space is allocated a huge estate just on the off chance that he happens to be visiting the homeworld? Make it make sense.
How many plebs are living inside a holodeck fucking imaginary pornstars? lol.
I would guess with more planets open for habitation, the limits on land aren't as pressing as they would be now. That's my assumption anyway. On the outer reaches of the galaxy, they use gold pressed latinum so currency hasn't entirely went away. I would imagine there are quite a few people living exclusively in a holodeck!
Haha yeah... but also...
But you make a great point in that money is necessary if only to interact with alien races. How do you trade with an alien race if you don't have the currency that they trade in? It's heavily assumed that there basically is zero economy and different factions don't trade with each other, which is a bit ridiculous, again refusing to open up the story to that kind of impossible complexity. They didn't even bother creating "Space Credits" like so many Sci-Fi shows have attempted before it.
Yeah, good points. I would imagine there has to be some kind of trade happening. They briefly touch on it in some episodes but never really dig into the meat of it. With the absence of currency, I am guessing you would simply barter for goods like they did at the beginning of time.
Amen.
This is only true if you think money is wealth. I consistently argue it isn't. Independent means is wealth.
Simple as. Also, trading between producers enables the full panoply of the blessings of modern civilization to be available without every individual needing to possess every means of production of every product necessary to them. This is a key that crypto is, unlocking that panoply without entering the gauntlet of taxable events, excessive capital outlays, or unnecessary overhead burdening production. Crypto doesn't need to be a store of value to enable commerce in this way, and in fact two traders exchanging goods can create a one off temporary crypto for the purpose. This is one way that the feasting of overlords on individual production can be prevented. Obligate parasites will parasitize everything they can, and curing the infestation requires total exclusion from the life's blood of each and every producer, eventually.
While it seems surreal today, the fact is that humanity - which is us - has entered the Space Age. The first 3D printed spacecraft launched in March 2023. Multiple manufacturers have adopted 3D printing because it has been proven out, and massively decreases manufacturing costs and increases specificity and achievement of bespoke capabilities, which is the essence of space technology with the diversity of technical needs dependent on mission parameters. Additive manufacturing is necessarily the optimum production technology for this field.
The addition of aquaponics, DIY solar (and other power production techs), and molecular printing (for drugs, DNA, and other pharmaceutical purposes) creates a colonial capacity that is going to be not only necessary to extraterrestrial development of resources, but enable a diaspora that is difficult to conceptually constrain to anything short of absolute freedom. Armies cannot defeat a diaspora, cannot chase down the dispersed communities with anything resembling economic efficiency and compel them to pay taxes to overlords. It's far cheaper to simply fund a colony to develop other resources, not least because far better security tech exists than firearms, and it's a lot easier to kill meatsacks with guns than it is to drag people back to torture centers to convince to pay taxes.
The advent of decentralized means of production is the death knell of obligate parasitism and the centralized production it is dependent on. Particularly aggravated and accelerated by access to space resources, which total an inconceivable wealth from current potentials on Earth. Asteroid Psyche is worth ~$1Quadrillion. The solar system alone is full of multiple such opportunities for development just sitting there, unowned, able to be developed by the first person able to secure the resource. Given the hostility of the space environment, security is not hard to produce, as merely disrupting extremely complex systems necessary to habitable environment maintenance is all that is necessary to defeat marauders from a site developed with security in mind from the get go.
Thanks!
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread
Those two books do a good job of explaining how different life would be if we weren't the slaves of banks.
The first printed in 1887, and the second in 1921.
Even when crypto ends fiat currencies, the millionaires will still be hiring poor people to clean the toilets of the wealthy.
The general population is too cognitively dissonant to even start thinking of escaping what the trauma based mind control has put upon them.
It isn't possible for them to free themselves, they think they are free.
That means that those of us that do know have to find enough agreement to reach the tipping point.
At the point that there is no return we will go forward to what should have been all along.
It will be scary for most people.
Freedom is scary, deal with it.
It doesn't appear to be on sale anywhere.
Bring on the robots!
I am working on it, actually.
People are the source of their own enslavement.
But that's just coded into our very social structure.
Most people are followers with a few leaders.
I'm not sure we need better followers, they are doing a great job.
So true.
No one rules where none obey.™
It is up to the 20% of us capable of changing our minds and admitting mistakes to lead them out of their enslavement.
Trust in 'authority' is at an all time low, seems a good time to strike, imo.
Maybe we can haz a bullrun?
I have a hard time thinking the debt system is going to go away. It’s so effective at keeping people enslaved and subservient to the powers that shouldn’t be. I want to live in a world where we can do things we enjoy and spend time fruitfully instead of being stuck in something we abhor for people that despise us. I just can’t picture how we transform things enough to make that possible but it’s not out of the question. Maybe I’m just not creative thinking enough right now which is pretty likely.
At any rate - I hope that we can wrestle control away from these people and get things back to where it’s a benefit to large groups of people instead of centralizing everything for the benefit of a few bored people.
Debt wasn't invented to control the population: that's just a side-effect.
If the core need for debt goes away then it disappears.
The core need for debt is an extremely high overhead cost for building things.
Can tech reduce this cost? At best only in certain areas.
Our reality is infinitely scalable as far as we know.
It doesn't have to be hyper-deflation. You are talking about what I call systemic or technological deflation. It's real and happening slowly and surely and it's not stop anytime soon. Cause the pace of technology improvements just keeps growing. Not always in the same place like computers, but rapidly in one place and slower in others.
On the other hand, the difference with the Bitcoin overlords of the future is that unlike with Fiat, they can only spend their Bitcoin once and it changes hands. Under Fiat, they keep printing more as they need it.
Yeah this is a really good point and also a point I have made with XRP.
Even shit-ass XRP can only be spent once. Upgrade!
Whoever managed to get to 1000 bitcoins or so by 2016 and didn't indulge in an exotic lifestyle has real chances of being able to live off that bitcoin for an entire life, selling small portions of it for everyday spending and nothing more. I wonder if there is such a person anywhere in the world...
Most of us would have probably gambled it already on shitcoins trying to make more money.
That's likely one reason why the cult of maximalism is so powerful these days.
A lot of those hypocrites got burned in the shitcoin casino at one point or another.
Greedy bastards... I got burned there without ever owning a BTC(or more than 0.5).
With its current size, can "the debt-based system" be killed?
A big cancerous tumor kills itself.
Yeah, that's a better description.
its articles like this with a comments section like this that makes hive a fantastic place to be. keep up the great work everybody. Its a pleasure to muse on these glorious outrageous mind blowing speculations.
Ken Wilber talks about Holonization. You ever read any of his stuff? He refers to everything in terms of the holon which is like a 'whole' made up of parts but that is also a part of a bigger whole, or at least has that potential. So a holon is both whole and made up of many parts, and has potential to dissolve in to its parts or to transcend in to being a part in a bigger whole. He talks about evolution in terms of long periods of sideways action until a sudden mega event in which something like 5% of the parts of a holon adopt a new mutated dynamic which is enough to tip the balance on all the other parts. At this point, as radical change sweeps through the parts, the holon itself is in flux and will either fail to operate, thus breaking down in to its individual parts (which are all holons in their own right) or it transcends in to novel emergence which reveals new and previously untested properties of its own. So a wristwatch is made up of lots of little holonic parts each performing their duties. It can be reduced in to its separate parts but only when they are all put together will they tell the time. One person with a watch can tell the time but only if it catches on and other people agree on the time will the community be able to use this tech to co-ordinate. This ability to co-ordinate creates emergent properties that few could predict or expect, and even more potential properties are revealed if the neighbouring communities adopt the same tech etc. At the moment, if we use this sort of theory of the patterning of evolutionary progress, we could say that we are in the process of holonizing as a planet/race/global society. Each holonic part (our nations, our currencies, our digital communities etc.) are all expressing the tenets of holons which include their horizontal capacities - a holons own individual agency alongside its communion with its holonic peers (horizontal parts of a greater holon) and vertical capacities - the constant balancing act of keeping all of its smaller parts in healthy working order, while adequately performing its function as a small part of a greater holon while all the while any potential revolution can threaten to pull them down to dissolve in to their parts or to transcend and evolve new emergent properties, either as a radical or in accordance with other radicals which may be part of an even greater transcendance.
It feels to me like we're deep in the melting pot of a cataclysmic event that will either lead to dissolution of various structures within our current holarchy, or to a successful emergent evolution of our global society in to a radical global society and potentially a radical interplanetary species. Its nice to imagine that other species on other planets in other galaxies might be going through similar leaps at similar times, like different monkeys attempting to use tools at the same time on opposite sides of an ocean. If this is the case then we might stand a chance of becoming part of a rich and diverse galactic federation someday. Ken Wilber also refers to emergent evolution as quantum evolution because of the disparity between the seeming liklihood of failure versus the apparent success and diversity of evolution in nature as we witness it here on Earth. Most random mutations in biology are lethal, and yet seemingly biological organisms have time and again managed to develop many non-lethal mutations all in accordance with each other in a relatively short time period to evolve highly complex and previously unseen traits which in my view, amount to more than just mere competition, but to a vibrant and creative display of the brilliance of a quantum intelligent natural holarchy. Who's to say that we wont come out of this distressing period of revolutionary turmoil as a radiant cosmic global intelligence ready to express ourselves anew in this coming age of aquarius? Ive got my money on optimism
Cryptocurrencies on their own don't solve distribution and inequality issues. They are tools that could enable new systems, but the overall design of economic and social structures matters most. "Generational wealth" may simply recreate what exists today if not coupled with broader reforms.
There should be no debt, no gas, no fees. Just a fair return of ROI in any aspect. And debt is a hen with its chickens. I got this saying last year from working in Europe. With BRICS counting on gold and with USA close to its deppreciation of the dollar, I see more debt....You article hits a sensitive spot, for sure.
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