Remember the early days of the pandemic, when we played alphabet soup with economic recovery? One has to be extremely optimistic to consider the much-touted “V” now, and there’s increasing consensus around “K”. There’s something subliminal about the former sounding like “we”, and the latter sounding like, well, K, signalling that we don’t care. And that’s why I began thinking of how those in the upper part of “K” are utilising their wealth. In addition to using it to create more wealth, that is.
I think there are at least two expansion narratives at play. One is seeking new “real” frontiers. This is a centuries-old pattern – the Americas, Silicon Valley – until geography has been tamed. We’re now on to “colonising” Mars. The metaphor is clear. The other is digital frontiers, where our time and mind space is being increasingly spent. Both are about escaping the confines of reality as we know it now.
The motivations are combinations of the spirit of exploration, greed, mastery, legacy and so on. In addition, I wonder if it is also a desire to secure the freedom to pursue one’s goals/ way of life etc. While this has been happening forever in “meatspace”, its messiness is one factor that causes the interest in digital space. And I suspect that this path will create halves within the haves. This post is an exploration of that aspect and I looked at it in terms of money, relationships, society, and evolution.
Money
It appears in many forms but a central currency still is the most common way of exchanging value of all kinds. Trying to make this digital is one way to approach this. The digital yuan is the best example. It’s trackable, programmable, and is definitely different from merely transferring “real” money over digital platforms. This is definitely preferred by existing institutions, both monetary and political.
However, crypto has been on the verge of disrupting central currency for a while, and NFTs are the most recent example of it getting a boost. Though the average person (in the top half) does have a lot of his/her money stored digitally – bank accounts, equities, it’s only the early adopters among them who have experimented with cryptocurrency. It does take time to move from a shared belief around a piece of paper, to a shared belief around an alphanumeric code. The commoditisation of trust using blockchain is still in its early stages. But the possibilities are massive 1, and while it starts in the digital world, it will most likely expand into the physical world sooner rather than later.
The only direction I can think of is this – money’s movement towards commoditised digital trust is inevitable because it melts the constraints of even digital money that’s linked to the central currency. And as with a lot of other things, the early movers will have an advantage. Also, like every other elite churn, this one will offer huge advantages to those among the elites who placed the bets right, and will also create a new set of elites, thus furthering the divide.2
Relationships & Society
In an earlier post, I had written on how, thanks to the proliferation of algorithms, and the seeming convenience they offer, our interactions with others, and community in general has further decreased. This has also led to increasing polarisation creating a vicious cycle. Add to this the increased pressure of the “highlight reels” we share on social media, and we have practically created an alternate life online. At this point, it has only sight and sound, but between AR, VR, Neuralink (as an example) and tactile technologies, the progression is towards a fully alternate life in the cloud. The Fortnite and now Roblox metaverse generation might not even blink at this.
But even in the present, many facets of our identity are based on affinity, and less determined by the accidents of race and geography. And relationships are increasingly going digital. From dating to Facebook to Reddit to erm, OnlyFans, this trend is only accelerating.3 Squad Wealth is an interesting post to read on the subject. To quote, A strong social fabric and the right tech stack will unleash a new wave of bottom-up economic experiments: interest-free P2P borrowing, anonymous lending pools, collective insurance, socialized ETFs, DAO-based freelancer unions, rotating savings schemes, revshare guilds, meme venture syndicates, crypto ponzis, exit scams, in-browser miners, upstate yield farms, boy bands, cults, and sovereign vacation funds.
The village raising a child might not have to shift online, as the human need for belonging could start playing out in the real world too. This is an interesting case for city-states to replace nation-states.
Irrespective of where the camaraderie is formed, there will be an ‘effective exclusion of external, unentitled parties’ (Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, via the link above) This does not mean they will be non-porous, but tribe allegiance would be paramount. Which leads me to their stance on “common good”. Culturally, what would be the motivation?
If this subject interests you, an excellent long read to consider is Where do pro-social institutions come from? Hope is in the form of a study that showed that “the intelligent are much more likely to practise conditional cooperation”. And what is known as the Flynn Effect – the rise in measured intelligence across the world. This could potentially lead to us being more empathetic. Obviously, the factors that could counter it already on the rise – wealth disparity, hyper-nationalism, to name a few. I wonder whether they former will lead to a “gentrification” of society in general, and closure of access.
Evolution
While money and relationships are all moving towards digital, we still live in “meatspace”, and are definitely not free of the constraints of the body. The human body is an amazing product, but it is still quite inefficient. After all, why does it have to have a shelf life, for instance? And degenerate as it ages? Our species is now smart enough to understand and resist the machinations of nature. A direction that we are progressing in is weaponising science, augmentation to begin with, probably leading to a new species altogether. 4 This could potentially lead to further disparity.
And then there’s the other direction. Not necessarily mutually exclusive from the first. Carl Jung’s “the undiscovered self” – the journey inwards, facing all the baggage that nature and nurture have given us, and then overcoming it.
The overall line of thinking reminded me of Pace Layers, and this quote, from Freeman Dyson sums it all up very well.
The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands. (via)
1 NFTs
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