Outer Edges (4)

they are cultural side products of the kind of triumph of capitalism. And so implicit, he doesn't push it hard. And obviously, he actually asked Charles Darwin whether Darwin would sort of provide some kind of epigraph of Das Kapital, which shows there's an absence of profound hostility there. But the implication certainly in Marx's occasional remarks about Darwin is that somehow this is kind of bourgeois capitalistic thinking being applied beyond the realm of the economy to much wider, I mean obviously Darwin generalised it to life in general, but I think there's

certain kinds of generalized Darwinism that goes even beyond this. So it's like the Marxist suggestion is this is kind of capitalistic thinking. And I think that this is partly what is a kind of main current behind this cause, is to think, well, what is capitalistic thinking? And I think we get a very weak sort of model of that in the kind of widespread critique of neoliberalism, which seems to me requires a kind of cyberpunk exacerbation.

I mean, the sad thing about the critique of neoliberalism is it's so sort of half-hearted in a certain way, and its implicit suggestion is that somehow we can see the sort of limits of a certain kind of a certain capitalistic reconstruction of the social order in these very sort of limited, half-hearted, compromised political processes that we see around us. And obviously the people we've been looking at in this little module, Friedman as the core character here, are much more, I think you could say cyberpunk in the sense that they really just take these kind of basic models

and push them far further than you're going to see if you're just looking around the kind of actual practical policy programs that are being implemented around the world in an obvious way. And it's sort of interesting, there's lots of things that are interesting about this, but one of the things that would be interesting is really to see a kind of contemporary, paranoid Marxist analysis that really takes the strongest cases rather than these very weak cases extracted from empirical political economies around us. So sorry, I'm sort of slightly, I know I'm sliding from this initial question but I think

I think we'll get back to that. Okay, so I've already sort of thrown a whole thread. So I think if I can just say something really quickly about Darwin and then say something about the Cambrian explosion in government and then maybe get to the direct point of this question Derek's asking us. So, I've been rereading Origin of Species, because it's quite a long time since I read it. And it haunts so many things. And I think

one thing that's immediately striking is that haunting Darwin is Malthus. you know Darwin really sees himself as as a as a some generalizing mouth and I think that it's an extremely interesting to call on a sense like the critique mouth is taken as somehow being sort of settled to general satisfaction I'm that I don't honestly think the left does I don't think the left is really criticized mouth for a century because it's much more it left to a certain kind of a established right I'm looking to consensus because that means general social

consensus on the right am amongst mainstream occurrences that mouth this has been set aside and it's been set aside because the fact that the the performance of industrial capitalism, since the great divergence sometime maybe in the 18th century, usually, I think around 1760 people dated from, has been such that these Malthusian concerns have just been shelled. Why are we worried anymore about the geometric expansion the geometric expansion of population and the arithmetic or expansion of resources when we're not living in that world anymore.

Geometric productive prowess is the kind of story of industrial success and this is seen as something that's kind of pushed Malthus aside. So it's interesting for a number of reasons. I think there's lots of ways in which one could try and bring Malthus back. But one of the obvious ways is the fact that Darwinism is itself a placeholder for the sort of basic Malthusian insight. You know, and I think there's something deeply artificial about deferring to Darwin without without the implicit foundation of that,

that one is still deferring to Malthus in doing that. And another thing about the origin of species that I think is very relevant to us and also very strikingly is that Darwin bestarts with artificial selection. The term natural selection is coined specifically so that it will make sense to us after a discussion of artificial selection. So the starting point of the origin of species isn't what happens in the wild. It's what happens with the domestication of animals.

And once he feels that the reader has a firm grasp on the substantial changes that can be made through artificial science, I hope that's not me, that train of depression. He then turns to the natural science and says, look, if humans can do this given their various given the time they've got, given the fact that they can only apply themselves to conspicuous phenotypical features of animals rather than getting down into their deep organic structure. He's got about six sort of comparative points, all of which natural selection has greater

power and efficiency. So if we can see artificial selection doing this, then what could we do, what can we assume natural selection could do? So natural selection comes in after a, and as a kind of passenger on this discussion of artificial selection. and artificial selection is a category that does really belong to in the widest sense political economy it's a it's a kind of deep level techno-economic theory and it's a kind of grounding

for notions of technology it's obviously like if civilization is constructed in political economic terms as a kind of techno-industrial capability, then its foundations are in artificial selection, like animal raising, selective breeding of plants and animals, is the model of productive advance, its kind of proto-industrial capability. And so there's a weird ironical twisting to this kind of Marxist commentary where Marx says, you know, implicit, because this is going on just a few fragments, but implicit is this notion that he says, little does Darwin know that when he thinks he's talking about life, he's really just talking about the conditions of bourgeois civilization.

And yet, by this ironical twist, actually Darwin is doing something much closer to political economy from the start. He's actually starting off with facts about human economic and technical, the foundations of human technical and economic civilisation, and then saying from these clues, we can get a sense of how these things might work. in the wild. So then, when we arrive at this late point that we're looking at, and we get discussions of things like the Cambrian explosion in government, we have come on this full circle.

And it would be very naive, I think, to say that this is some kind of naturalistic metaphor. If it's a metaphor, lots of inverted commas, that refers us back to Darwin, then Darwin is already engaged in political economy quite explicitly. It's a theory of proto-industrial production. and if we can tell that story very briefly and take it further than of us all wants to use I'm it has a number I think stages

I and stink and the the first one stop is a simply select its box boss bulk of human social history this has been one that matters. It's the fundamental human technology. And everything else, all the windmills and clocks and devices that people tend to look at are economically supported by the fact that human agricultural capability has been on an upward curving, probably exponential, slowly exponential curve through the fact that

the crop yields, the usefulness of animals, all of this biological framework that human societies have been surrounded by have been undergoing this approach of semi-unconscious improvement through the selection of superior specimens of animals and plants, those most convenient. So that's the kind of deep foundation. And then on top of that, what capitalism introduces is the application of selection to

industrial activity in a narrow sense. I mean what I'm trying to say here is that it's an embedded, it's a set of embedded relations and we have been embedded within this deeply unconscious artificial selection of animals and plants we then, the market order allows selection processes then by again primarily unconscious automatically and unconsciously spontaneously to forms of industrial and economic organization and that's really what mean by capitalism it's what

it's why Marx makes this conversion back the other way around, it's why he thinks Malthus and Darwin have been hypnotized by capitalism. It's because the same logic of variation and selection and selective development is work in both cases. And obviously when Friedman and all the people we've been looking they're looking for a market in government, and they're looking for an improvement in that market in government, they're trying to apply this same artificial selection process to human political structures quite explicitly.

Their implication is that this is like all these other things already in place to some extent, but it has deep flaws as a market and by more deliberation and tweaking and transformations of this market that we think are clear in principle, it can be hugely improved. And then we jump across to the third stage of this, which is the one that I think Derek is talking about, where technology itself becomes subject, again, quite explicitly to this kind of Darwinian, generalised Darwinism.

Through the iconic form of this, extremely sexy at the moment, is obviously the deep learning, which is deep learning being the application of generalized Darwinism to software. Once again, it's a sacrifice of a certain sort of notion of explicit, highly design through replacement that with a context adapted to highly efficient automatic so that the deep learning program

will try out zillions of things select them according to certain criteria the people running that thing have no idea in what is being done. If they did, its capabilities would be confined by what they could conceive. But as we've seen most dramatically with the whole alpha goes in, is that a good deep learning program comes up with stuff that people had totally not expected. And it comes up with it using a kind of mechanism that is fundamentally dull in character. So very crudely, obviously, it's rushed very crudely. There is a whole construction of economic and technical history

that sees it all in terms of zones of application of this basic Darwinian selective mechanism. First for animals and plants, then for business organizations, than for the actual details of machines, where in each case, an automatic, largely unconscious process of improvement can take place. So that's why I think clearly this can be an explosion in government is applicable to these questions about artificial intelligence. Because what's at stake in both equally is a deliberate project of expanding the scope

of a spontaneous selective process. What we're obviously mostly concerned with is the application of that to government, which is obviously full of intricacies because government is especially associated with notions of design. It seems it's supposed to be a zone of judgment, a zone of deliberate decision, a zone of planning.

It's interesting, even Peter Thiels, someone who certainly could be thought of as a left-winger, but that's what he actually explicitly says, that for tech startups, Darwinism works much less successfully than intelligent design, who uses that language provocatively and deliberately. And I think that that contest, crude though it is, Darwinism versus intelligent design, it's obviously nothing, it's by no means exhausted by its context in terms of argument between natural science and religion. It's a hugely ideologically

freighted term that pops up in unexpected ways and coming at us in unexpected directions. Okay, I'm sort of obviously getting into sort of ramble mode. I wanted, I'll just say, I want to really try and do some stuff about critique and autonomy and self-presupposition and pseudo-paradoxes a bit later. because I think that that is a nexus that kind of locks down some of the philosophical stuff going on here.

But I think I should stop monologue mode at least for a minute and see what everyone has to say about where we are. Sorry, the strong texts, the idea of economic zoning.

Yes. So I'm trying to, I guess, understand or just get some kind of way of grasping why the ideas need the sea, or whether the ideas need the sea. Okay. Because the kind of liquefaction that occurs with the economic zones kind of opens up space for not necessarily alternative forms of governance, but the kind of legal structures on which this depends without this kind of, I guess, bootstrapping relation

between technological innovation that's required to make seasteading deliverable. So I'm just trying to reconcile with this sort of set of conditions that the seasteaders have kind of imposed upon their own way of realising some of these ideas. It's only marginally more deliverable than a set of free-floating O'Neills in space. To bring this down to the sea, but still to have a set of technological constraints just

seems like I think that's the thing that I'm interested in. Yes. Okay, that's good. I for me this sort of that as really satisfactory response this leans forward and I might try other see what I can get me that tried it just or's I'm what I think is really where because I think I'm why the sea or why do you go into the sea studying or even space studying or these forms Why take it to this extreme beyond the zones? You know, the Michael Strong piece says you can do, that these dynamics can be to a large extent effectuated

and are being effectuated just in special economic zones. So why do we need this larger context? And I think the answer is that there's a philosophical impulse that takes things in this direction. And really crudely, that philosophical impulse is toward a fully imminent account of... I'm just trying to find a word that isn't just repeating their jargon. But let me just take one step back.

If we go back to neoliberalism, obviously it's used in so many different ways. It's a difficult term to work with. It's often just used polemically and emotionally and various kinds of things. I think often there is something there that can be extracted. And what that thing is, is what you could say, speaking within a dialectical framework, a contradiction in the recent form of liberal reconstruction.

And that contradiction is the fact that while having the objective of substituting political processes and state coercion, supplanting those and replacing them with market dynamics, it finds itself falling back upon structures of state and political authority to implement this program. So it's this sort of notion that I think a lot of critics of neoliberalism have that you end up with something like a state directed marketization where the kind of authority and coercive potential of the state is directed towards the production of markets irrespective

of sort of popular demand. And if you're looking at this with a highly abstracted philosophical grid, what you're seeing here is the reintroduction or persistence of a transcendent element. That's to say there's something from outside the market order that gets brought in, in order to actually make the market order actually realistic, to actually implement it. So you don't have a closed loop of imminent production of market industrialism. At a certain point

you introduce this external transcendent element of governance to try and force this process forward. And I think this is why on the sort of, I'll use this with zillions of inverted commas around it, on the neoliberal right, their Che Guevara is really Augusto Pinochet. it's like a Pinochet T-shirt is the kind of equivalent of a Schleyker Barrett T-shirt and there's a kind of mix of symmetry and asymmetry on the two sides but what is being symbolized there is precisely this thing that you have the Chilean economy

was radically liberalized the Chicago school went down there kind of popping in and out to give advice about how you produce a market economy in this environment. But it's done via an authoritarian military government, which is the kind of transcendent element. And it cannot be a closed loop. There's nothing in the kind of market processes of market selection that actually brings you to finish finish a doesn't come out the the kind of social dynamics mock and encourage but rather has to be just shipped in from above or outside to do

this and I think that I would say not wholly unreasonably by any means I think on the left this is a kind of iconic image of what neoliberalism is really about and can be seen in a milder form in the sort of Thatcher-Raven versions of it in the Anglo-Plan countries. So how does this connect with the point here? Well it connects because a special economic zone obviously requires political toleration. It has a kind of, it has a a governor who operates as this transcendent. You've got two parallel processes. You've got a political process in which the zone is authorized and its boundary is set

and all of these things have been conditional upon state support from some sort of sympathetic government. And then you've got the economic dynamics in the zone and jurisdictional arbitrage and the fact that that experiment is reinforced and encouraged by the fact that it receives investment and that's taken as a kind of economic vote on the success of that policy but you can't quite close the loop this is why this Michael Strong model is a kind of intermediate step It's somewhere between the kind of a set of sort of neoliberal political proposals and this kind of wilder seasteading model.

And the attraction, despite all the technical obstacles, the attraction to go all the way into dynamic geography, all the way into seasteading, is that you finally close the loop. you know what you the key transformation from this philosophical and abstract that happens with seasteading is that you no longer have state approval and there's a whole set of arguments that have kind of semi-developed I think already just over the three weeks that we've had that connect with this a lot like you know it we've had people single what if the government what if the American Navy or some other political power wants

stop on on you back still calling upon some level who's whole existing the state and we can get back but it's complicated discussion to Terrence distributed security capability a lot of the things we've touched upon. But I think that you can see quite clearly that in philosophical principle, dynamic geography is the point at which you actually get this closed movement of this time. And you cannot close the movement in a special economic zone. However much the government is kind of incentivized to support the special economic zone and a certain

kind of subtle process of political evolution encouraged by that special economic zone and national interests are so served by that special economic zone that it exerts political pressure to maintain that zone's existence. All of that stuff happens. There is some kind of nonlinear process between the economic success of the zone and the politics enabling the zone. But you cannot quite close the room. Because there is still this transcendent element of political authority that has to be shipped in to make that thing happen. And that's what Patrick Friedman and everyone

across the horizon in seasteading, it's not the technical stuff is interesting, but it doesn't explain why people want to do this. I think what explains it is the philosophical closure that you achieve at that point, where state toleration is no longer, has to be an assumed element in your political coexistence. Sorry, I feel like I'm not letting anybody else raise.

No, no, that's fine. If people want to clamour in, then they can. Okay. So, I mean, there's another way of looking at this, which is that the ideas are kind of being driven back to the sea, which not in a way that kind of enables, but as a way that kind of closes down. So I don't know, I mean, just this idea of being driven back to the sea bothers me a And the idea that seasteading is wilder, I'm not so sure that that's the case either, because

the first thing that they seem to do beyond the philosophical, which I accept that, and I think this coupling of technical implementation and the philosophical is precisely where the seasteading works? I guess I'll add, I think there's like an aesthetic almost of exit that you can put into place with a technological solution, right? So you don't need to go through the same sort of political process, right? Even though sort of pragmatically it might make sense to negotiate a special economic

zone in one of the 180 existing polities, convince one of them that you carve out this sort of large city-sized space for a special economic zone, you're very much in the sort of the area of voice or political rhetoric first. I think you're doing that. Whereas if you have a technological solution for achieving exit from a polity, then you can avoid that whole process and sort of reset in a much more radical way. I think that's a lot of the appeal, rightly or wrongly, that would be how I would characterize

it. Yeah. Well, and it's in that... Can you guys hear me very well? I'm on a phone, which is kind of new. It's clear as a bell. Oh, nice. Excellent. So, I mean, the move to a spatially unstable environment is one where... I mean, political and territorial structures are ultimately or can be understood as technologies as well. And they're technologies that can be out-competed if you have the money to put into it once you're in a spatially unstable environment like the sea or space. And I think the interesting thing about this point where the immanentization, the philosophical closure process meets the technical challenges of seasteading, is that you can definitely identify boundary conditions

on how the development of those technical solutions is going to go and how it's thereby going to affect the sort of social development process beyond just this completely flat and arbitrary variation and selection process. Because I think, I suspect it's intrinsic, but certainly true of the sea and of space, that any spatially unstable environment that thereby promotes these lower barriers to entry, higher switchability, and so forth, also imposes a higher risk and a higher rate of accidental casualty and a higher vulnerability to bad actors. to sabotage, to piracy, to whatever it is. And if you look at, generally speaking, how humans react to a higher risk of fatality,

higher vulnerability situation, that imposes constraints on how we organize our societies. I mean, you see, like, the rules of the sea, right, with maritime stuff. And that's a very limited example because ultimately the rules of the sea are you rescue sailors, which is to say repatriate them to their spatially stable, territorial concentrations of family and wealth, a.k.a. their homes. But if their homes are precisely that which is drowning, and the only places for them to go, I mean, in theory, assuming that you don't have some sort of refugee agreements with terrestrial states and all that sort of thing, is other places which are also people's floating homes, then what is currently maritime norms becomes vastly more complex and vastly more important.

And this isn't necessarily a bug. I mean, it's a feature as well, potentially, if it's handled properly, to the extent that it introduces a counter-tendency to total variation, which could lead to metastability, which is important for long-term success in an environment like that. And all of this goes, I mean, even though space is more homogeneous for the most part than the ocean is in terms of these threats, like it's also just vastly more hostile. Right. Yeah. Sorry, that wasn't so much a question. It's just a... Yes. I feel that I've got 98% of the way to what you're saying, but I think there's one point that you're making here that could be just reinforced

one little bit. Like when you say about these boundary conditions was the point that you started off with this, and I'm not sure exactly how you're finally wanting to pin that down. like saying that I'm saying that the risk of this the risk of these ventures set some kind of limit on what can be expected from the world you know I'm and this one sort of yeah I mean I don't mean like first-order boundary conditions like hard limits on any possible kind of variation I mean second-order ones, so like boundary conditions in the system theoretic sense of limit functions

that drive the dynamics of the system. So like these risk rates, which accompany the curve of technological development, I mean, presumably over the course of technological development are reduced. I mean, that would be a big part of the technical development of seasteading would be minimizing casualty. so you've got a risk you've got a casualty curve you have a technical development curve and then you have a norm development curve and those three things are all going to interfere with each other and sort of set the boundary conditions in that second order sense of this seasteading system that's developing is kind of what I meant there yeah yeah I mean

I mean it obviously is the case that there's huge inertial obstacles to this. I mean there's some that are just like in a narrow sense technical for sure. But there's what seem to be a more general set of problems that are to do with just inertial inhibition that I'm sure is very tied up with the kind of things that you're saying. order to absorb the kind of risk that is required to commit to this kind of polity, you sort of, there's a lot of inertia to overcome and where's that going to come from? Is it pull

pressure or is it push pressure? You know, like either they have to be working, they have to be working sufficiently to be massively attractive, whether they are being economically productive or whether they just have reached a stage of feasibility that they become politically attractive to people or what people are fleeing from in terms of the existing political economic economic order has to be so nightmarish that people are climbing onto these dodgy rafts

to escape. And obviously without strong pull or push features it retains this kind of pie in the sky character definitely, which I think is the… Well, that's actually kind of a whole equally interesting separate, not wholly separate, but notionally separate thing from what I was trying to bring up. Because that sort of thing, taking to these dodgy floating barges because of nightmarish conditions on land, is definitely already happening. That's the Mediterranean refugee problem in a nutshell. And that's sort of an interesting angle on it

in terms of being driven back to the sea, taking to the sea, especially in sort of eco-collapse situations. But I mean, the inertia is still a good term, but the inertia I meant is more like if the dynamic geography sort of abstract framework views the sea as this frictionless, open, like perfectly smooth spatio-political field, it's more the internal or intrinsic inertia of that field as it is actually a physical phenomenon, which imposes constraints on structures moving and forming inside of it. Yeah, this is quite close to what I think I was trying to get at, which is one of the things that seems to be happening quite early

is the idea that you need to introduce standards of connectivity. You know, your seasteading platform needs to have a series of edges. It needs to be either rectangular or octagonal. It needs to have sides that will allow it to kind of fit together in this geometric formation. So it kind of, I guess it introduces this kind of ordered system into the kind of open, wild, dynamic, ocean-like structure. It wants to introduce a technical instrument in the same way that Strong's economic zones require this kind of technical instrumentality to kind of liberate these economic spaces.

Sea-setting seems to introduce planning legislation as one of the first things it does. that's a kind of that's a state and position in a sense so I think that's something that I'm interested in that tension that's there I mean it seems to me that it simply couldn't rely on those kind of standards I mean right now I'm in Canada and you know as always is this this plug night you know none no plugs you cannot carry plugs anywhere if after whatever 200 years or whatever it is

we do not have plugs what is the chance realistically of having neatly tessellating Seastead module in an environment where there is absolutely no presupposition of government support. I mean, the fundamental gesture to the existing state system is obviously irreducibly hostile. I mean, this is, I'm sort of going to bracket it a little bit, but we keep touching on it. But I think it's really important to note this. you know like out of the philosophical tradition you get a increasingly hardened

aversion to transcendence in Kant it's just like a mistake but at a certain point in these different traditions it's like people really want to kill transcendence, it comes out of the tradition automatically you know, Bitcoin, it's rhetoric is very moderate But, you know, trusted third parties are obviously targets for extermination. You know, despite Satoshi Nakamoto's very mild language, you can tell these things are being lined up like ducks at a fairground to be destroyed. and you know some another could like to learn some what are in the state is just like I'm

your foaming foaming kinda rage to annihilate this the structure so I think that's at sea studying its lineage is all best you know it wants to close the loop and all these things and they have a sort of nice philosophical formulation to them but it it means that it's positioned in relation to transcendence, to this transcendent political state instance. Intrinsically, the tendency is towards extreme hostility. You know, it is giving the finger to the state. That's what C. Steading is. I mean, that's the notional originary tendency, for certain. I mean, these theorists, the people initially driving,

that's their motive for introducing this concept and really trying to get it off the ground in the first place. But I mean, in the case of both in Bitcoin and Delos and Guattari are examples where you see re-territorializations in the Deleuzian, linga, jargon, whatever, massive ones, where blockchain technology escapes just Bitcoin, and now there are like 19 major banking, you know, the trusted third parties par excellence, building internal, essentially trust-based versions of it, which definitely, I mean, It's certainly not clear to me that they don't have a greater potential for economic success and driving the further development of this technology than Bitcoin itself does. And then in the case of D&G, probably the single institution where they are most pragmatically and compulsorily read

is the IDF War College, which uses them for the very purpose of re-territorializing the occupied territories and fighting their war. And in the case of seasteading, I mean, so the shape of the pontoons aside, there's the issue of, so if a nearby pontoon gets flipped over in a storm and there are 300 people drowning, do you have rules of the sea or responsibility of care? Do you have these sea polities generally exiling or refusing to trade with polities that do not recognize the responsibility of care to save drowning neighbors? And do you see these development of rules of the sea that are more ramified to deal with people who actually live on the ocean?

and I think that's sort of maybe more what Derek was getting at is that there has to be some reincorporation instrumental reincorporation of dimensions of transcendence as the way of furthering de-territorialization as a metastable trend that can propagate in the long term even aside from mass re-territorializations like that of Israel or Banks I mean in the absence of a superior tribunal an effective superior tribunal what is the status of these general norms I mean I'm not just wanting to be skeptical or cynical about it

I think it's in a way the heart of the whole of this question is how far can you get away stripping all transcendent in positions from this is this is the con for expand that and you're saying and in a different way I think but connected there he's a well what about you know what what about the required no this and and obviously that my question is just more can you you know who's gonna do this like the rules of the sea I mean everyone of course can put their hand on their heart and say, we will take care of kind of drowning seasteaders

that wash up on our patch, and that would be nice. But, I mean, are we really envisaging that there's some kind of global authority that's going to turn that into a... Well, no, not necessarily, but if we assume that most of these are to some extent dependent upon trade in order to survive, like unless they are just 100% self-sufficient, they crack jet fuel out of water using solar power and then grow algae, which they survive totally off of, because it's genetically engineered with all the minerals that humans need and blah blah blah, then like, there is a real there is the potential for the majority of actors to impose real behavioral pressures on individual nodes. Like, I mean, so, you know,

responsibility to protect, like, hand over heart aside, what about piracy? You know, I mean, yeah, you can defend against them with guns but then you just have like a wide open anybody who can't carry enough armament on their community or doesn't have a community structured upon those lines is just arbitrarily vulnerable to pirates to piracy and that's not that's not a stable or effective proposition i would argue just on face well there's obviously is a large anarcho-capitalist tradition of trying to deal with this problem. I mean, this is really the... correct me if you think I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me structurally it's the same problem as the ANCAP's talking about their protection agencies

and these insurance schemes and various forms of radically decentralized market-provided security. And market provided here just to mean in the absence of an effective transcendent authority. So your example of trade, it seems, is crucial here. I'm assuming too they would be commercial. I think the whole project is totally commercial. and but by commercial is precise man I am a system of connections that operates with how any chance and support so do you know to trade is cancel that meet each other from radically different

cultures you know on the edge of a jungle and through some sort of a self-generating norms end up making making a deal. You know what I mean? Like all these cases of you leave a little pyramid of trade goods on the beach and withdraw and they come and sort of put a bunch of trade goods and you know this is something that isn't hypothetical, it's something obviously has happened and the whole the whole history of colonialism at its edge is about precisely arranging conditions of trade between parties that do not share a transcendent principle of authority. So I don't think, that seems to me something that can be assumed as possible,

however impractical and complicated it can be. I think the whole of this type of thinking requires that self-organizing commercial. Yeah, I would definitely cop to that. And maybe the better way to phrase what I was proposing is that there is an obligatory, there is a definitely existent market niche that will be filled for business models that imminently promote necessary minimal co-op, whether it's like insurance models or mercenary models or whatever, buying into jurisdictions in which there are certain rules of the sea and in which, you know, your trade gets levied or something

if you have a certain number of infractions. Like whatever it is, there's a niche for business proposals that would produce these kinds of iminem regulations. And that's kind of what I meant by instrumental reincorporation of relative transcendence. because in each case you're identifying some sort of relatively transcendent issue or model or a model that in the abstract would have been viewed as transcendent on land, something along those lines, and then you're incorporating it into an imminent business model, which is your insurance outfit or mercenary group or protection agency, as the ANCAPs are fond of saying. so yeah I mean if we weren't in a philosophy class if we were in a brainstorming session for the company

that we were going to run in this notional universe that's the kind of thing I'd be proposing yeah I mean the whole it's interesting for instance your example of piracy whether the seasteaders have anything to contribute to that discussion that isn't already within the kind of ANCAP discussion. And I'm not seeing it at the moment. I mean, you know, I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I don't think there's any innovative solution being proposed to that kind of question. and it's obviously

this collective action about secure is Austin is I don't think it's unreasonable take its the fundamental organized state. I guess, you know, there's different ways that you can come at this. One is just to see the pirate as an antagonistic microstock. And so the problem on that level just comes

out as a deterrence type security. How do you make it, assuming some rudiments of game rationality that the pirate wants to actually profit from aggression then you just have a deterrent problem in protecting your resources in such a way that they cannot be acquired at lower cost than their value. I'm not saying that's simple but I think it's very straightforward. very straightforward. Yeah, there's definitely the kind of technological boundary condition that I was describing. If everybody has to be able to, either

in terms of spatial proximity and relatively collective possession of armaments, or every individual node's possession of armaments and ability to operate them and keep getting ammunition for them, which is basically a budgetary expenditure, then that definitely sets that sets pretty significant evolutionary constraints on what kind of actual sea-setting societies you're going to see. And it's also the piracy, like your sort of notion of piracy as being potentially more than just an antagonism is interesting. If you read about the DAO soft fork, the Ethereum soft fork, being a denial of service vector, and that imposing, meaning that even if the majority of miners support the soft fork,

that that kind of censorship is disincentivized or potentially wiped out in each case by the existence of a DOS attack. If you just assume that any vector for a denial-of-service attack will be occupied, potentially, just by the wildlife, by whatever, you know, saboteur or person who can find a way to derive commercial profit from it will do it through blackmail or something and compare that to piracy. and the ability of something like piracy to drive particular formations. I mean, obviously, the theme of parasitism within biological evolution is almost impossible to overestimate.

It's completely central. and so the fact that there are parasitic agencies, and it almost certainly an explosion of parasitic agencies. I mean, if you're going to have a Cambrian explosion of government, you're going to have a Cambrian explosion of parasitic agencies. But then, so then the question, well, what really does that say? is that something that is a kind of a logical problem or is it actually that that is your dynamic milieu and that the solutions to these various parasitism problems are actually

the basic criterion of adaptation and success and improvement and that is what you know You know, when we're talking about government, what are we talking about? We're talking about security solutions within this framework. Yeah, I definitely agree. I think my only point really was that that is an orthogonal to some extent and potentially or over the long term much more powerful driver of the dynamics of sea studying or orbital colonization or whatever than just the political preferences of individual humans that can move back and forth between these things modularly more or less at will. The constraints on adaptivity are about the environment ultimately more than they are

and certainly alongside human socio-political preferences of those going out to them. But this exit pressure, you know, if you're referring when you say people moving backwards and forwards between these different things, you know, what is the trade-off that they're making? I think it's only one or two steps to really see how this ties together. That Even being part of a nano state, you are basically deciding are you being efficiently provided with security. I mean I am maybe being a bit abrupt to basically just translate government as security but

I think it's worth trying to do that because I think that's fundamentally what you're getting to at this point. So you stick with the Seastead that provides security at what you think is a reasonable cost to you and as soon as that cost becomes excessive and you're then into the whole libertarian frame of stationary bandits that are exorbitantly taxing you for their security services, then Then you have these out migrations and the kind of investment of alternative models. So it seems that the basic selection process that these guys are trying to catalise is

one which is supposed to hone efficient security provision. An efficient security provision is going to be the thing that makes something attractive and the failure to provide efficient security is going to be the failure mode that drives people to alternative options. Okay, I understand that. So sort of diagonalizing between the two things is security folded in as a feature of adaptation or as one of the primary features of adaptation to the environment. of security and that's both the essence of political preference and that which is constrained by the environment. Yeah, no, I get that. I mean, there's obviously a strange tendency in sort of mature societies for this security

problem to go into eclipse and just become a kind of presupposition, isn't it? So it seems even under circumstances of extreme geopolitical stress it's rare for security provision to really become an explicit poor grounded factor in people's political choices and I think that this world that is introduced by the whole dynamic geography perspective is one where those semi-suppressed security imperatives become far starker and more explicit

and are not just tucked away as a sort of presupposition of civilized social order as they are in most modern states. Right. One thing I was going to try and introduce today is, I thought, there's a distinction from Marx that I think is quite interesting for this he obviously

uses it in reference to the history of labour but I think it can be kind of switched across to politics and I think the connection between what's involved in that switching is itself interesting and how much of switching is really happening or whether it's just a change of aspect which is the distinction between formal and real assumption. And I think that there's a kind of Marxist vocabulary that was going to come at these things from that side, which is that what all of these discourses, with seasteading taken as a kind of iconic example, what all of them are about is initiating a historical phase

of the real subsumption of government into the economy, into capital. And I think that the sort of structure is quite helpful for a couple of reasons. One is because it's set up by Marx as a solution to this problem about self-presupposition. like you know that capital requires labor but labor requires capital and isn't that this kind of chicken and egg problem that we've already come to with network effects that we come to in fact with any singularity or any process of autonomy you come to this thing that is a pseudo paradox

it seems like a fundamental obstacle or logical inconsistency but is really just a clue to the kind of radical dynamics that we're dealing with. And so his suggestion is, you know, capital ultimately autonomizes and produces its own labor power. It sort of produces the labor need, it industrializes work. But there's a stage of formal subsumption where it's simply able to recode labor processes existing under previous regimes as if they were capitalistic. You know, treat something as if it were a wage-labor relation, even if it evolved in a very different way.

And then over his process of historical development, this formal subsumption, where you're just overlaying a previous system with a new code, is transformed into this real transformation where you have an industrial producerat, where you've got capital itself, kind of building modes of labor and ultimately Taylorism and these whole forms of work discipline. and you've actually built yourself something real rather than just precoding an existing system. And I think that exactly the same thing can be seen in terms of politics and economy. You know, obviously, capital emerges in a situation

where there's already politics, there's already states, there's already all of these structures. and the kind of discussions that we see around about neoliberalism are very tied up with this again there's the kind of relation of transcendence there's the parallel contradictory sense that at one and the same time you're trying to marketise everything but you're assuming stuff that hasn't itself emerged out of some kind of market process and I don't think this is where I think go into seasteading, you go into cyberpunk, you go into these extreme

forms of thinking if you are going to imagine what real subsumption of the political into the economy looks like. I don't think that you see this in the kind of ideological discussions around neoliberalism. I think the assumption there is it would be meaningless even to think here and that neoliberalism is hypocritical because it has assumptions of state support and political order that it cannot supply out of its own market-oriented thinking whereas the seasteading all of these attempts at a Cambrian explosion in government, commercialization of government and market in government

are models of real subsumption, the real subsumption of the political process in the economy. And that's, you know, that's again another way of getting to this point about a closed philosophical loop where at this point there's nothing at all, there's no content to the political administrative government order that is not itself a product of an economic process, a commercial process. And it's driven exactly by these things in terms of conventional

economic categories to do switching costs, barriers to exit, all of this apparatus taken from economics becomes the fundamental vocabulary for discussing the production of government, the supply of government. And so it's a supply side revolution in government that's being conceived within the framework of real subsumption on the basis of this twist. So it almost begins, or could be seen to be, not begin, but you could start your analysis

from where Patry, for instance, he says something to the effect of, all the government does is it's just a service provider basically and you should see it as nothing more romantic or whatever than that. It simply provides services but once you're there, once you accept that premise that government can be analysed sort of on those terms then perhaps it's almost the case that the logical conclusion is that you have to have this subsumption of everything within that framework.

And so the only sort of resolution of that is some kind of model where, I mean he doesn't all the way to proposing sort of for-profit government as far as I've seen, is that right? In terms of his, does he, I mean I haven't read all of the book, but does he sort of propose governmental structures that actually deal with that? Well, yeah, that's an interesting question. I sort of assume, because when you say for-profit government, I mean, any government is going

to have to resource itself. Yeah. So it's hard to really imagine what the opposite of a for-profit government is in this scheme. I mean, it's like he's basically saying that a government is like a business. I think he's making that explicit. And so I guess I'd assumed that he was just taking that resourcing structure from the business world and just applying it straight to this model of this Cambrian Exposional Government. But in saying that, I think it's good. I think it's important to raise this question explicitly.

Because rhetorically he does not emphasize that as anything like as much as certain shadowy figures that we might allude to at this point. Even though it's a supply side revolution in government that he's ultimately calling for, he comes at it from the demand side totally, doesn't he? It's basically you're situated as the reader, as someone who's basically a consumer of government. And it's the same as a certain kind of liberal rhetoric about, you know, that the market order is one in which the consumer is sovereign and it's for consumers

and the whole thing is about subordination of all these producer interests to consumer. pressures and and I think that sort of patchy stuff is within that sort of law as much more hard-edged but it's within that same basic frame think you know I did the alternative just to put it in context is like it there's a kind of I'm ran tight rhetoric a capitalism this completely the opposite around and it's about entrepreneurial business producer heroes, you know, and the consumer is just the soil in which they work.

And it's interesting to what extent those two different type of rhetorical constructions are actually equivalent to each other, structurally and mathematically, or whether there really is some substantial difference there. It's, I mean, it's trying to think about the idea of for-profit, and Adam said for-profit of whom, which is, you know, a fair point. But it's, what I'm thinking is, you know, the question is, he says it's government's inefficient, but it's sort of how do you get to that, according to what metric, on what,

you know, how are we measuring efficiency and why are we measuring efficiency. And if you do have a sort of, the idea of government being subsumed into the economy, I mean, you know, the metric is, I suppose, is profit really, is inefficiency. or at least the less profitable it is, the less efficient it is, the less profitable it is from that perspective. There's the question about what it needs to do and how it funds itself and who owns it. Yes. These are all questions but it seems to me that once you get, once you cross that threshold all that and you start take all the sort of the romantic ideas of the nation

the nation-state and the government as a sort of you know sovereign charity or whatever and and you start coldly analyzing it measuring it according to how efficient it is and so the goal is the most efficient government possible it seems to me you're already measuring it according to capitalist market principles capitalist principles and efficiency equals profit in one sense you know at least if you're efficient enough you will generate a profit I think the only thing that needs to be held onto here is the fact that in a

liberal order of the kind we're used to be where there is this kind of formal separation between the security level and then so there's a security strata that then defends any property rights that you might have are dependent upon that level This is like the dark one's primary and secondary property distinction. So what we're being propelled by the seasteading thought is again this immunitization where the question of property and the question of security are refused, fused again, or de-segmented.

And so when we're talking about property and when we're talking about security, those two are exactly the same thing that we're talking about from two different angles. So all I'm saying is that when talking about profit, we must extract that from this regime that has a transcendent security assumption. it's not profit denominated in some kind of guaranteed form of wealth that is supported by a rule of law and a security apparatus of another and higher kind if an efficient profit maximizing

nano state of this kind it's exactly the same thing to say that it is improving its security as it is to say it is functioning profitably. There's no discontinuity between the two sides. Because the property rights have to be actually imminently protected. There's no external tribunal that are protecting your property rights beyond your own security capability. Is the identification of efficiency with profit,

I might be wrong, but is that not necessarily a relative efficiency, like profit via arbitrage, so that in a market where all of the agents are arbitrarily close to operating, efficiently for a given baseline of efficiency, profit is a symptom of inefficiency in that locale. Like, you never see whatever it is like economic versus normal profit. If normal profit is just assumed to be 10% or X% or whatever, anything above that is a signal that that entity is arbitraging some larger inefficiency in the market as a whole. Is that right? Well, I think there's a lot to that, but I think it's also complicated because because if you have a set of equilibrium assumptions about economics,

then of course that is right. But in terms of radical innovation, is that really effectively described as arbitraging an inefficiency in the market? If you produce some radically new, unimagined innovation that gives you for some period monopolistic pricing ability over that thing. It was there some inefficiency. Isn't it purely a retrospective, a weird formal retrospective reconstruction to suggest that there was some inefficiency in the market that is now being arbitraged away? and it's just all you're doing in a way is assimilating these innovations to sort of equilibrium economic models

in a way that's neat mathematically but is probably not dramatically realistic. So, yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. but there's still a temporal threshold, or wavelength is a reasonable word, where we are talking about dissemination and adoption. Monopolistic pricing is a function of how undisseminated or unadopted that particular innovation is. So yes, it definitely makes sense that economic profit driven by monopolistic pricing is a symptom of the generation of radical innovation.

But how long it continues and its ability, and therefore its ability to be gathered into capital, which requires security in order to secure its property, resulting in monopoly entities as opposed to transiently monopolistically pricing entities, is a symptom of arbitrage of relative inefficiency. So you've got, like, there's a sort of temporal function about how long this lasts and whether it's able to transform into a self-sustaining phenomenon with respect to any particular innovation. Yes. I mean, it's complicated because you're on the sort of economic side of that, and you could run the same question very much on the security side, couldn't you?

you know like if you have some security premium that speak that's come from some innovation some kind whether just narrowly technological more institutional but that you have some for some time a kind of a premium on your on security that she seems to be subject to the same I guess you could say entropic dynamic, doesn't it? That it tends to disseminate, that it tends to be copied, that after a certain time, you know, any form of military superiority

is also diffused. And I guess what I'm trying to say is, once again, it can't be that there is a real difference in nature between these two different problems. I mean, when you're at the level of imminence, the security problem and the economic problem are purely divided by aspect. There's a purely formal difference, not a substantial difference between these to hope and and they only appear like as a substantial difference because it particular way that state relates to become

to the economy under the condition com used the the definitely makes sense I'm just trying to serve work out the ramifications especially if the idea of them as aspects, like temporal aspects, forward and backwards, security, economization versus securitization. That's it, though. I'll stop monopolizing. Yes. I mean, it's, you know, once you're on this actual point that government is a business that sells security, that provides security,

I am I'm going to pop cells you provide security so governments are security businesses that's that seems to be the common you know once we are into this whose zone we're following this particular line be attempting to hit this kind of plane of imminence on the far side neoliberal that seems to be the basic axiom that you have to accept it's more of a definition I guess. And so, I mean every kind of economic provision in a certain sense is then, every form of

economic provision is as easily interpreted as a security factor as security factors are sort of subject to on analysis I there's nothing there would be no element once you have this kind integral integral system there's no element all economic like that would not be part your security if only because she did we go back to the parasites pirates and you if you're sitting on a on a on a stock of stuff value any car then that immediately has

security I are you able to it and and to the degree that you call there's no you're not it's not secure pop has to be subject on a mathematically exact security discount if you can't protect it. You can't just offload that security problem onto some superior agency because there is no such superior agency. Right, so given all that, does it make sense to say that security is a kind of counter-economic good, like in the sense that it sustains, if we think of in a certain very abstract sense,

of every fish, every jewel of solar energy, everything that is produced as being like a radical innovation in the sense of a new entry, a new input into the economic stratum. And then the ability to hold on to these things as similar in some, again, abstract sense to monopolistic pricing to sort of ownership, whether of property in the sense of withholding dissemination of the innovation or withholding that piece of food or energy from parasites or something, that security is a wavelengthening or monopoly-sustaining good, which is counter to the economization tendency, which otherwise acts in the market, and which can be traded as a good itself.

Yeah. Well, it's certainly... I mean, let me see whether this is in tune with your wavelength language, because I'm not... Yeah, I'm still seeing how those click together. But it's certainly to do with the preservation of disequilibrium. And, I mean... Yeah, that's exactly what I meant by the wave sort of language that makes more sense. There's a kind of series of extremely well-established steps now between you go from equilibrium thermodynamics

to evolutionary mechanics as being a vector that is heading towards locally increased disequilibrium and that locally increased disequilibrium is the whole of adaptation. I mean there is nothing that is being selected, there is nothing to the content of natural other than this accumulation of disequilibrium that is allowing certain species to avoid being kind of relapsing back into the kind of bath of thermic death.

And I think that all of this stuff is Darwinian and it's all saying that. these nanostates, all of them are in the business of trying to claw their way up this kind of some local hill of disequilibrium, you know, and that as they tumble down that hill you know they're going into piracy, drowning stuff that I mean all threats so that I you know in this kinda ocean of hop up which

only through kinda strenuous efficiency that they able to crawl away up into disequilibrium in the other direction prove their security prove that affluence improve their ability to replicate their business I'm And these are all the same thing. They're just different ways of talking about the same thing. Okay, so then I guess in that context, how do you view the entire pressure towards driving back to the exit to the sea, essentially, as pursuit of a sort of completely unexploited reserve of efficiency, which can be used like what is the

what is the pursuit of disequilibrium of higher disequilibrium that's driving exit yes I mean obviously you know Patrick Fiedem is very explicit that it's about hunting for a sort of reservoir of variation that is untapped by existing socioeconomic systems you know that there's all kind of this is back to this which we probably should continually go back to Cambrian explosion in government what is that saying it's a you know just like prior to the Cambrian explosion the biosphere had just not tapped this massive potential reservoir of variation and

and then it hits a certain threshold and all kinds of body plans and organic structures are innovated and obviously then subject to the predictable selective processes that would then hone them. And I think that it's absolutely strictly right. This is why I'm constantly very hesitant about just dismissing this as a metaphor, because I think this is exactly what is being explored by Patrick Friedman here, is to say, look, we haven't even begun to explore the range of what you could call state body plans.

just inherited certain things from history and they've been honed and adapted a little bit, there's been very, very little experimentation with the structures of states. Once you kind of set aside the American Revolution, or just allow for the American Revolution, but that's basically it what what have we really seen in terms of people experimenting with forms of government and it's because we're in a we're in a sort of suppressive equilibrium like there's no there's no real opportunity to try out

these extremely hazardous, complicated experiments in government under current conditions. And that's the, so that's, just to get back to your thing, that's why the sea, isn't it? It's why go over the horizon, is to go into a zone where you can once again tap this potential variation that is at the moment left unexplored. But I mean, not to labour it, but I suppose the question is what's the end game? I mean, because the thing is with what Patrick says, he says, on the one hand he sort of

On the one hand he says that government is merely a provider of services and it's not a very good one. It's not very efficient and it's pretty easy to imagine his more libertarian-ish vision of things. But he also at the same time says, and it's a bit throwaway, but there also is the possibility for governments that have a completely different ideological foundation. So you could have your left anarchist commune or your social democratic paradise filled with centrists and early centrists, you know, sort of Blairite heaven or whatever.

But if it's actually the whole purpose is to unleash some sort of dynamic forces that will force a sort of Darwinian-ish competition between microstates, are we looking at convergence or towards an ideal model or is it an acceptance that there is no ideal model the sort of utopia of utopias which is a bit more like the original Scott Alexander idea of the Mormons can have their own seastead and what not

or is it both? Can you have your eccentric religious or other based polities on the one hand and then on the other hand you have your sort of ultra-capitalist neoliberal race to the bottom this is what Tenenemis would maybe call it of trying to pursue the most efficient lean, minochist state possible and then even into neo-cameralist for-profit things. It's, when you say that we've barely unleashed these forces,

it's sort of where would it take us? Where do we want it to take us? Right. I mean, look, I think this question is really great, except the last two formulations of it are absolutely terrible. I mean I'm you know I think totally its absolutely to massive people begin to try lock down this question like a you because okay sorry whether convergence divergence predominant all what's the balance between them get is you just huge and fast and it's and I'm it was almost impossible to limit because it's a kind of cosmological question it's be it goes be overflows

and its mass but but having said that the discovery process is not set from it actually happen you know that's what makes it tell me there's no There's no way that you can really predict in any strong sense. You can get some guidelines or you might be able to kind of put together some interesting model. But there's no epistemology separate from the performance of the experiment. So anything that is... That's why I think this expression, experimental government, is absolutely crucial.

You cannot anticipate it. If you could anticipate it, there would be no point in doing it. You would just select the best one anyway. Why have this massive Cambrian explosion of government if you can find the ideal government by some process of preliminary ratiocination? and I think that to say what do we want is even more is even more misguided I mean because you know what we want there's two basic modes

that are going to be expressed we can divide it by say voice and exit. So the current system is supposed to provide what we want by formal political mechanisms. And then this model is supposed to provide what we want by revealed preference, exit, by consumer pressure on government. neither of those mechanisms actually realize forms of government that correspond to previously articulated human intentions today. I mean, you know, I think that that on both sides

needs to be pulled down as a kind of as a as a myth that you're that government is fulfilling some some free articulated conception of the good in the political sphere it's a sort of really powerful illusion but I think it's like completely inconsistent with either a realistic analysis of what we have now or a rigorous model of what experimental government would be like. I mean everyone will have their suspicions as to where they think it will go there. I mean, everyone will have their suspicions as to where they think it will go there.

Yes. Surely. And there's also, I mean, you could describe it a bit like opening a Pandora's box or something and you've no idea what could possibly happen. But I mean, you know, there are going to be people who are investing in these seasteads and there are going to be people who, like I think actually Michael Strong referred to, was it some businessman who was looking to invest 10 or 20 million dollars in somewhere that had, I think it was like the political, sorry, the economic freedom of Hong Kong and the social freedom of Holland, I think he said, or something like that. Yeah, something like that. So the people who go in for these things will certainly at least to start with,

and perhaps you can argue that it doesn't matter who these people are, that the processes will take over and whatever, but they will go in with their own intentions and visions which might fail. Yes. Yes. That's true. I mean, you're in a bit of a... You get to have it both ways a bit, right? yet to say everyone gets to do whatever they like and and from their own community but I want for my own community and of course it's going to be like this because that's the best way right I yes I mean everyone's gonna have first-order political preference on I'm that's not gonna go away even in the whole your model is based upon

de-emphasizing first it's in order to concentrate on the frame so you Pat Pat she Freeman of course there's a there's a type of society he would like to to live but and the fact that he stopped just simply proposing that as a first order model for everybody to accommodate to doesn't make doesn't make him suddenly different to the site Could we pose that process and just move to the experimental paradigm as an immanentization of citizens to the state and vice versa, individual humans versus the structure that they compose,

which is the state, usually through these transcendent third elements like the good, justice and so forth. then maybe hypothesize on that basis that forms of government, like whether it's minarchism or demarchy or algorithmic governance that implement this immunization in one way or another, you know, are by reducing the responsibilities of the state to minimal actions of individuals or maximizing the level of democracy to like real-time brain chip decisions or making the entire thing automated, that those are more likely to succeed or at least more likely to be part of the variation, to be more seen in the variation and propagation, which I

guess are kind of the same thing. Sorry, I'm missing what's the comparative when you say more, more than what? More than traditional models that do not pursue a tendency towards immanentization of human individuals in the states they compose. Right, right. I mean, you can complicate that as well, right? Because if you take seasteading, I think you've got a new physical sort of equilibria, right? So, like, one of the reasons the individual is a nice political construction and is because we have this physical equal to be a

all up what is which a very mobile and around on and you know we we have all these conventions a sort of autonomy and so on society basically for that reason on but you actually have a new unit I knew physical unit which is the ship arm all you know the shoot village or barge village or or you want to call these or octagonal things arm and it's quite possible that that's the real political equilibrium in this sort of scenario you know you might might theoretically allow individuals leave it's really about the ship taking off whatever the power structure within that particular ship is no that's really

not I mean obviously the Cambrian explosion is in a way to do the cell. So, you know, what's the fundamental building block of the whole thing is that you've now, rather than this prokaryotic regime where the cell is just sort of selected on on its own, you now have this thing about constellating meta-cell, you know, and so this innovation in a building block is what really does all work. So yes, for sure, then you've got this new type of political cell, which I guess, like

a biological cell, can internally exchange parts. I mean, the crew wouldn't necessarily be consistent. They could exit or enter, perhaps. It can exchange internal components, but it would have some institutional consistency. And I think some capability for replication, I would imagine. And if some module really works, then I'm assuming that thing would be copied to greater

or lesser fidelity. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I've been thinking about this cell model throughout this conversation. and I've also been thinking of it as a kind of a software platform with open source coding language and so each cell or microstate is defining its territorial boundaries but that's kind of like security so the selling of security is the invention and lateral distribution through these holographically similar cells of new modes of boundary definition so then that's the Cambrian

explosion and all these completely different modes of boundaries across the that's a very good language to introduce for sure protocols and it probably is one sort of subsidiary question about this is whether the way in which this is being articulated will itself obsolesce I mean you know when we're talking about nanostates that this is there's a kind of implicit vocabulary to do with the units talking that probably doesn't have long-range survival

this you know once this let's just assume the full cyberpunk model and this gets catalyzed do have this explosion of new government innovation in this untapped zone, then we probably are not really positioned right now to even comprehend the units that would make sense. We're just really groping about what the actual structures would be in terms of we've inherited notions of the individual, the city, the state, and we're applying these models. But probably a real Cambrian explosion presupposes a transformation of the kind of levels of

organization that is, in principle, resists anticipation. So yes, I like that boundary, this kind of boundary definition question I think is really good. And related to that boundary definition, if you were saying that there's the equivalence of the security and the, I think, profitability question, and so boundaries then are they're the definition of stockpiled wealth as well as the use of that wealth to protect that wealth with force and so it all it

be boiled down to coding of spaces as interior or not right yes I mean I think the whole thing can for sure be processed through the notion of property, where we're assuming that property has to be understood as completely imminent to its own security, for sure it does then involve these inside outside boundaries i mean it's interesting how appallingly

flaky the notion of property is from a philosophical point of view up to the same you know the philosophy of property is extremely extremely badly structured and and undersweighs it and people falling back. I mean, you know, the whole, obviously the, well, this is arguable, but I would say that the people who've tried to do this most rigorously are probably like, you know, Rothbardian-style libertarians who take these things very seriously. And they fall back on, you know, these Lockean metaphors to do with sort of, you know, sculpting nature yourself. And it's just absolutely philosophically horrendous in terms of its lack of rigor. So I think that that's definitely something that we'd be philosophically hoped for from this stuff,

is that we actually get some notions of property that are actually formally rigorous, rather than the kind of weird, sloppy frontier metaphors that we've had to put up with up to this point. I just put a link in the sidebar. I mentioned this elsewhere, I think, the Project Scepter. And if you read the revelation, it's eerily similar to the type of language we've been starting to use in these conversations. And they're talking about these holographic, composable cells, but their language is very precise because they're programming it as a piece of software.

Right. Yes. Yeah. I mean, earlier, where Jake was introducing this forking language, I think it's like, obviously, a lot of the things happening in software are providing the concepts that are needed for these wider, messier phenomena, for sure. I think that blockchain introduced forking language is going to be absolutely crucial in the decades ahead as a piece of conceptual clarification.

because we have a much tighter conceptual grasp on what happens when a blockchain forks than we've ever had about a process of shism or separation or splitting in a political context up to this point. So there's a massive regularization that has happened. I mentioned in the sidebar earlier suppressor, so we were talking about this dichotomy between kind of a strong level of a property system, I guess, or a central control

maybe not an actual central control, but an effective one versus if that begins to relax or if you move to the frontier, then you can start to have more variety. So if we're trying to connect that to a definition of property, then the relaxation of that control leads to non-properties or alter properties, different things that are not property but are somehow a different version of property. can you give some examples no I don't know if I can that's my question they might not be possible to talk about because what we're doing is specifically

relaxing the thing which allows boundaries to be talked about I think it's helpful to be really clear about what's happened here historically I think it is really fascinating you know what I why when people are talking about property attempting to talk about it rigorously they go back to this lock in thing which is taken from the front home and home stay with this notion that much got this actual original production property under these conditions that a break different from the conditions in which properties formalized by a mature organized state it's a very strange circuit

that happens here because because I'm under conditions of insecurity front there is no 0 state I'm there is no state in endorsement you know what I mean like to be really crude about it you're out on the front here with whatever the natives or whatever. And what is your property and what is beyond your property? It's extremely hazy in the sense that it is strictly a private security issue. You know, you build a wall just at random around your property and what you think

is defensible. You know, and the whole thing, if you can hold it, if you can stop it being stolen by the Indians whatever then you know its property and if they steal it you lost rendered the state only gets coming much later and then over codes that thing where if you wanna sell your farm to someone else you know you then have this reference to this the party transcendent party that will for all the legal forms in order and you know you have right to that property such that you can transfer it to another party within the kind of consolidated political order. It stopped being a frontier situation. So

what's happening in that whole circuit is that it's under the frontier conditions that you have this flat, imminent problematic in which there is no difference between property and security. I mean it makes no sense as a as a as a pioneer in in this complicated on formal situation you have no property concerns that the not security concerns vice they're completely the same but like you say they're extremely hazy under those circumstances because they're not legally formalized and if someone if if you're in communication with someone over in map in using American case on the East Coast

you hasn't moved to the frontier and you're trying to chance your property to them then that haziness becomes extremely obstruct you know they were what they're telegraphing using what exactly are you selling and you can say all you know well I can roughly tell you the boundaries you know and beyond a certain point you know you'll get scalped or you can't stop your potatoes being stolen and it's just completely inadequate from a formal point of view but on the other side when it is formalized it's also dirempted because of the fact that the security factor then becomes

assumed, you know, when I'm selling you my car under kind of ordinary non-frontier economic situations, the fact that my kind of control over that car is secured by police and military capabilities at the level of the state are completely off the radar, you know, and it's It's all tightly, neatly economically formalized, you know, and the precise value of the car and when it was last checked and all the papers and who I bought it from. Everything's perfectly in order, but at the cost that, you know, we're now in this split-level arrangement

and the actual political conditions of ownership in that formal sense, the security apparatus required for that ownership have become invisible. So, sorry, I'm just saying in terms of what Anders is talking about here, this question about when property becomes hazy is a complicated one. you know at a certain point when you become when the problem becomes flat it tends to become also by and if any

and it gets rigorized because gets split and becomes philosophically philosophically problematic introduces transcendent elements exactly point where becomes mathematically tractable and rigorous because of the fact that the security aspect has been abstracted from the property aspect. Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say that in that context of distance and of coding transactions and making it more rigorous that an answer to that question of what some examples of parallel property constructs under this definition would be.

And it seems like computer systems, whether networks of them or the operating system running on a single computer, instances of programs and so forth, would be a really obvious one then because it's precisely this question of can you transfer a certain program into an operating system? Can you add a certain computer to a network, communicate back and forth with it? That it's at that point that you have to propagate security definitions. you have to recursively monitor what's going on in the network or the system and entry and exit to and from it in order to preserve security against the equivalent of bandits on the road or stowaways or tainted goods and so forth. Now the only real difference is this difference of boundaries and vagueness of boundaries

because we tend to assume naturally in our sort of conceptual image of property that it is scarce and discrete and more or less a flat hierarchy, that if we add hierarchy to it, it's a hierarchy of coding and not a hierarchy of properties composed of properties. I mean, there's some extent of that, like goods that come with an estate, which is basically land, or an inheritance document, but it gets much more complicated in the case of software. Well there is no equivalence is there because certainly when we're talking about even land, land is a bit more difficult but you know a seastead is an object, anyone can fork a

blockchain if they want to, they'll have trouble persuading people to join with them and to recognize that fork as the legitimate one. But you know, you can endlessly duplicate an MP3 file. There's no property in the traditional sense of I own this because you can immediately and for almost no cost duplicate it and propagate it and whatever else. The thing about the frontier is the philosophy of property. And aren't they an account to try and sort of unify or give a moral account of property

rights that can form the basis of a legal order that is imposed from where there was none before that is then backed up with sort of physical violence? So what I sort of thought, all the stuff about mixing one's labour with the land and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, it is a bit, it is very flimsy. I mean the other option, not to bring up the Dark Lord again, but it's the primary property thing isn't it? You're on the frontier and you've got your horse and your revolver, but in what sense

do you own them? Back on the mainland or wherever, if someone took it from you, you could get it back through legal means or whatever. But when you're out on the frontier, there's nothing you can do. You can either defend yourself against someone who would remove them from you, but there's no higher authority, there's no one to appeal to. So it's reduced to what the Dark Lord said, which is, you own it if you in fact do own it, and you can protect it, and you can physically stop anyone from taking it away from you.

And it is interesting that the technologies, sort of cryptographic technologies like, you know, Ethereum and Bitcoin, they actually give that capability that you can in the absence of any legal system. So you could be on the frontier and you've got a connection to the internet, you know, you could trade with Bitcoin because the whole thing is secured by itself just using its cryptographic. Yes. You know, it's cryptographic technology. Yeah. It's a bit like I've always thought that DRM, digital rights management with music downloads,

is sort of a way of, it's like a primary property approach. It's like a sort of digital version of a lock. The aim being that you can secure your property yourself without the need for... So the record company, they've got the legal rights to this song, but as far as the internet concerned it's basically a frontier and it's anarchy and everyone's copying their files right, left and centre. And they can't really practically do anything about it. So they introduced this digital rights management, cryptographically based but obviously weak as history has shown. And there are the two.

There's can you secure it physically on your own, independently, without recourse to anyone else. And that's the nuts and bolts of property as it works in the frontier or in space or wherever. And then there are, you know, or are you relying on a separate, you know, a sovereign? Yes. But of course as between sovereigns, you've got this, it's the same situation. It's basically the frontier, isn't it? Because they all have to have the capability to defend themselves or alternative, they have to rely on someone, a bigger fish who can defend them. Yes. In which case their claim to sovereignty is, question. Yeah, yeah.

yes it's secondary or dependent or whatever you'd call it it seems to me that going back to something you said in the first week you mentioned the three technologies military robotics one of them was the internet and one of them was sorry Sorry, yeah, space maybe. Yeah, it was space. Space is the real, lots of these ideas break down in terms of space, certainly in terms of land and securing it,

because certainly now it's not as if, the seaset has seemed to act as if there are no laws governing the sea, or that things like land reclamation are completely outside the scope of existing nation states, which isn't really true. But with space, it seems as if it's almost limitless. You can just pack up and go wherever. There's not even been any attempt to map it, I don't think. When you say space, you mean just like vacuum. You don't mean like astronomical objects. No, I was thinking more that your Seastead was, I don't know, like the International Space Station or something.

Maybe it's in orbit around a planet or moon, or maybe it's not. Yeah. I think this is right. I think this is getting on to, I mean, it's so far an underdeveloped theme, but it's one of the most interesting in this whole thing. It's exactly here to do with the... You know, there's a model of territory, isn't there? Like, we had this brief discussion last time about, like, terrestrial and territory and these notions that are a little bit amphibious because they shift about. I mean, is the terrestrial just the land as opposed to the sea?

is everything on earth, whatever. But certainly, there's a kind of terrestrial model of space which is scarce, heterogeneous, immobile. And it's opposed to a kind of model of space that at its limit in terms of deep space is completely unlike this at all. I mean, you know, like whatever you say about the sea, and the sea is already like a kind of weak version of this, but deep space, the notion of owning deep space

is almost incomprehensible as now. You know, you could own an asteroid, you could own a meteorite, you could own a moon. but but some you know there is just vast amount of homogenous empty space that seems to therefore just throw all these notions territorial organization into into the abyss you know what it I know in science fiction movies it still has that these various large-scale political constructs in space have, you know, we're entering Romulan space or something like that. But I think there's something deeply flawed about this notion.

I think it's just missing something about what that kind of cosmic void really is. That is perhaps almost unimaginable on this level. It doesn't tolerate the application of our terrestrial political conceptions at all. I did want to say, your three technologies, I would have added cryptography as, you could perhaps say, because you've got the internet in there, that you include cryptography. Certainly, Anders mentioned forking, or someone mentioned forking.

I mean, the idea that cryptography could play in governments, especially the sort of Ethereum blockchain type thing, where you've got sort of what's equivalent to a constitution for a nation state. and obviously the sort of the American Revolution and the sort of what happened in the 20th century with all these new nation states with new constitutions the idea that part of the experimentation and the adaptive processes could take place through forking forking

either the blockchain or code on your nanostates, GitHub or whatever it would be in the future is interesting. It's just another issue of, or it's another example of property and security being imminent to each other. Cryptography is a technical means by which programs are imminent to their own security and once you can use the blockchain for example to apply that to political structures to DRM to ownership of individual pieces of information, security of a network against viral infiltration, cryptography, signing, etc. The provisions of irreversibility,

I mean they're sort of like the analog of violence almost. Yes. Yeah, it's almost like a sort of vector for taking a step back from centralization of, you know, it's disintegrative because everyone can maintain his own digital property and And it doesn't require any central authority to back it up because it's enforced by reference to the limits of computational possibility. So there's an ultimate limit that enforces it without reference to anyone else,

which is very interesting. and cypherpunk rather than cyberpunk. Yeah. But there we are. Yeah. So I was in reference to space and also the sea in different mediums, I mean, yeah, I was thinking about, have any of you seen Dollhouse, the TV show? They weaponize brainwashing technology in that, so it's like a gun you can point at someone and wipe their brain and replace them with a different person from a hard drive. And so then it immediately starts this horrible world war where they're wiping out whole sections of countryside and replacing them with rage zombies, basically. And so thinking of the TERF as that medium,

of like brain TERF or Pleroma, where interiority is coded sections and the children that we're trying to protect are highly coded sections. and it's a war of all of these coded sections trying to decode and recode their friend or neighbor sections so that that territory or profit or security boundary becomes merged. So the scale is, there's no determinable scale. the individuals could be people or they could be sub people or they could be people so where is that button where is the the AI that's trying to to hack its

way into the security core versus the sovereign individual inside that's saying yes or no I agree or disagree that we should form this type of of inter-government. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yes, it does make sense. I mean, these limits are extremely challenging, cognitively. I mean, there's the limit of deep space, and then there is this cryptographic limit. And the cryptographic limit is extraordinary, especially when you bring in anonymity. you know like our assumptions our assumptions about the opposite of anonymity I don't know quite

whether there's even a word for it you know where you the holder of property is somehow visible identifiable localizable you know all of these things we we assume you know the the body of the agent property also and but to move into a zone where these things are anonymous cryptographically protect I'm you know you said I'm soon you simply have no idea who the owner is of some I mean it's okay that's a sports car but you know what if that is a nanostate

or you know, that you have real subsumption of politics in the economy and part of that is that the ownership structure becomes completely cryptographically protected. You know, it would have certain kind of branding devices and all of those kind of things to organize loyalty and and and residential identity and or the stick and things but you'll there's no reason at all to assume that your highest level property structure is going to be socially visible at all so I think that those if you take take these things in combination

I really we've got deep space and you've got radically anonymized ownership of sovereign property of political structures they make a lot of these security questions a lot more complicated you know I mean you always at when we have set up our little models what it is to engage in aggression the notion that you can target the enemy that you can identify and localize and you know who it is that you're fighting is part of that is part of that model. And so, I mean, if you're wanting to wage war against a kind of anonymous stockpile of Bitcoins, it's simply impossible to do that. They cannot be targeted.

So I'm just saying this in order to say that a lot of these actually really taxing and challenging and I think deeply conceptually fascinating security issues are actually probably transitional in the sense that we're already sort of looking to certain types of property that go far beyond our conventional security calculations. I was thinking about a possible next step. It would be, or one of them could be these, all these cells which are transscalar, forming basically a hegemony, a consensus of the intergovernment, of the non-consensus.

So that would be like a lateral mass distribution of forms of government which were found to be perfectly disagreeable to all, or perfectly agreeable to all. That were then disseminated laterally, horizontally. So then you get a monopolization of forms of government through de facto adoption. I think I might have to... Sorry. I mean, in that case, so, if in this sort of trans-scalar cell, like, we're basically operating in a biological environment,

and the relevant questions are, what forms and what environments are going to be stable or going to be successful, then a monoculture like that is vulnerable. Like, in ecology, it's intrinsically vulnerable. And so once any kind of exploit becomes available, which can target either those structures themselves or the very fact that they are so widely adopted, it will be used to somebody's profit. And then a certain amount of heterogeneity becomes an important survival feature of the ecosystem as a whole. And so it seems like if we're sort of asking, well, so if we sort of abstract that from just the sea to sort of space and anonymity and this sort of like maximally fungible digital space embedded in vacuum, the only things there are to attack are tactics and strategies themselves.

abstract structures and also historical trajectories, telec vectors and the stored cryptographically verified history of these particular vectors. You can't wage war against a fungible anonymous entity, but you can wage war against particular ways of waging war. And another science fiction example that's good for that is Glass House, sort of Charles Truss, a loose sequel to Accelerando, where you have this historical redactionist war, where someone is trying to erase their own history in order to re-anonymize themselves, and it amounts to an attack on this entire polity whose basically only services they provide are identity and time.

And they do it using a viral worm that destroys identities that have memories of these people or this entity, this whatever, that is trying to erase itself from the record and redacts people's memories as they pass through gates and so forth. And that seems like a really compelling example, if you abstract it all the way this far, of what warfare might look like in that kind of context. So I haven't read this. I must do. Dude, you would love it. It's so good. You're saying they're trying to become anonymous. They're trying to hide? or they're trying erasure is it a form of erasure is it a kind of form of camouflage or is it rather that well so the full context

and like you never because the story is set like after the redactionist war which was basically totally successful you never know who these antagonists who started the war and released it's called the curious yellow worm so the larger context is so So the wormhole routers in Accelerando, they've successfully hacked them and can generate their own, and they have a completely spatially distributed and topologically organized sort of spatial polity, like polities or space stations that might be flung across the whole arm of the galaxy, and so they have instantaneous connections within the light cone of the, because it's not causality violating, of the original router that they hacked them from,

and polities are organized exactly like networks, but they're networks of instantaneously connected deep space installations. And so that's one of the interesting, really fascinating things about this, is that he poses all physical warfare as network warfare. So they've got firewalls and filters and viral invasions or physical invasions through the infrastructure of these instantaneous gates and so forth. So it's called the Republic of Is, and Charlie sort of poses that ultimately the only things that a government needs to provide are time-stamping and identity-stamping, or time-tracking and identity-tracking. And whoever released the curious yellow worm, it's not clear why, because they destroyed an enormous amount of history and broke up the republic of being in the process.

So it's not clear why they were trying to cover themselves up, or what exactly they are that they're trying to cover up. but they release this redactionist, this historical redactionist worm that interpolates itself into the gates, edits people's memories as they go through, and launches physical attacks on things that are external to the gates that hold historical trajectory information. And then everything that takes place in the story is sort of like hunting for war criminals who don't remember who they are, and maybe you're one of them because your identity was corrupted during the war, and the Republic is splintered into different non-consensus histories in this network that's now internally firewalled against itself and things like that. Which is a mind-boggling model of what warfare looks like

once you completely get rid of the territorial model. I mean, it's interesting how every attempt to try and that sort of shelve the crypto digital aspects of these problems just collapses and you find yourself back talking about these things. Like obviously from my point of view, looking at this seasteading stuff and all of this is adding another, an attempt to add another different aspect, another way of looking at things that isn't coming out of blockchains and cryptographic revolution and all of this,

but it ultimately reconverges. I mean, I guess it's just like the relation between cells and DNA. I mean, the code, ultimately it's all about properties and all your agents and strategies and security systems and all of this stuff eventually is a software problem. So yeah, I mean this is where we come on our arc today for sure. for sure. It's back to this. Sorry? Strategy which is adopted

is a perfect cryptography which can hide property by anonymizing it and dematerializing it. Doesn't that maybe signal the end of war instead of making war on different forms of war, then there's no reason to do war anymore because you can't kill someone else's property. So then it just is a matter of building or forking the blockchain branches where then you're not taking away from someone but you're just building on a different part of it. But I mean that's the whole essence of the problem of war, isn't it? Is that there is no actual perfect security. there is no perfect and universally perfect implementation of cryptography

that makes it possible for no one to have any incentive whatsoever to be a bad actor. Like, there are always ways to corrupt something's history, corrupt its identity, steal people's identities, and therefore, and if identity, if we're in this sort of context where it's not just property and security that fold together, but identity, property, and security. And identity is no longer a matter of a separate thing, which is your name and your family. It's just this abstract ownership equals X. Then, to the extent that this is actually technologically embedded, war necessarily continues. In some sense, whether it's the biological war of all against all, which is viruses and bacteria and so forth, or something relatively more traditional-looking,

the process continues. as long as it has ragged edges. Which, you know, I mean, I would argue is like a basic reality criterion, but I guess I could be convinced otherwise. We would be interested to see how the sort of trend towards trustlessness and would affect it. So, you know, you've got these sort of micro-states that nobody even knows who owns them. There's no sort of nation that has like ties, traditional ties of blood and soil and loyalty to the flag and all that sort of stuff. They're just people who happen to be there just because of economic incentives or whatever, and their involvement is totally atomised like that. Would that not decrease the likelihood of

war? Because you can see that England is going to go to war against France because they're they're two separate nations who have a historical rivalry and they enjoy getting each other's backs up. But anonymous Bitcoin nano state one, anonymous blockchain nano state two, they could have common shareholders or they could, the whole thing could become, it could alter the dynamics completely. It's almost difficult to imagine what it would be like. I mean, it's partly how abstract do we allow war to be? Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say, is that my usage of war, like maybe it would be more comprehensible to say strife, or some strife, systematic transgression,

bad actorship, etc. You know, if we think of war as like a background state as opposed to an exception within that background state. So crime, political combat, to the extent that it's willing to use negative sum tactics, maybe would be a minimal definition. Yeah. I mean, I think, again, within the framework of generalised Darwinism, I mean, I know that there's a recurrent tendency to try and say, to soften Darwinian figurative thing and say, oh, he's importing all the stuff about competition and war and nature I think at the end of the day if certain formations of whatever level are being edited out by some kind of competitive, you know, there is an abundance of variation.

that variation is not universally preservable, some of it will be eliminated and from the perspective of the variation about to be eliminated, that is an unfortunate eventuality, then you're going to have some kind of conflict. You know, things that are being removed from existence will resist being removed from existence and from their perspective, certainly they will be they would be subject to what seems like aggression. Sorry, I don't know where the voices are.

That's the whole question about think of the children though, right? Waking up a child to the larger world is the same as killing a microstate, invading its security and killing it. So, what are you saying about that? I study initiation, the ethics of initiation is that you can't do informed consent, because that's the whole nature of it, is you're teaching someone something that they didn't know they could learn. So this idea of if there's something being changed or re-territorialized, something that

is being aggressed against, and going from the level of the microstate to the archipelago intergovernment, it's kind of a similar problem or analogous problem to the think of the children, that whole issue is we have to think of the microstates every agreement where is that it was like I said earlier who's holding that button whether they want to divest and dissolve or not. I mean it seems to me like I might be being sort of just ruthless about this but you know the whole of this starts with this imperative for efficiency you know we have increased variation, we increase the pressure of selection in order to have more efficient

government. That's what improvement is. And that, you know, just, I'm sorry to be repetitive, but it is a strictly Darwinian framework that, you know, you are producing, you are overabundant abundant on the supply side, which means that there has to be a level of culling that compensates for your oversupply. Some organism produces vastly more offspring than can possibly live. If you are doing that to your political system, you're breathing more and more and more experimental

types of government, vastly overwhelming the number that can possibly survive. The carrying capacity of reality cannot accommodate the hyperabundance of government experiments that you're making. So it's implicitly now that you are eliminating governments in exact precaution in exact precaution to this kind of creative oversupply of government experimentation. If you want to say no, we don't want to be killing lots of governments, then you're saying automatically well we have to limit our experimentation. You can't have it both way up and center. So it seems to me implicit in this notion of a Cambrian explosion of government is something

that looks like conflict. I mean it's like things being eliminated that cannot want to be eliminated and will resist their elimination in whatever way they can. But to carry Andrew's point into that context is sort of that, does that culling include conversion? Because in this context, we're not just talking about sort of gross material survival of a set of physical resources that can propagate themselves. It's also mimetic. It's like there's an ideology, there's an initiation process. And so is part of that question of being able to vary

and preserve the robustness of that vector of variation and have it be selected, that you preserve, like, nascent internal components against variation due to memetic contamination from the outside. And in that case, is it really something that is solely driven by an imbalance between abundance of produced units and scarcity of the resources to allow them to survive? Like, memes, it's not entirely clear to me how memetic competition encounters scarcity boundaries or is massively hyperabundant in relation to the neurons and wetware that can hold them?

Well I don't know. Aren't memes extremely competitive in the sense that there's a certain number of human brains on this planet, memes propagate ideally without limit. And if they are going to seize control of brains, then they have to keep out the alternative memes that would want the same squish wear for its propagation. being on the gross level, aren't religious and ideological conflicts precisely about the fact that there is a finite squish wear pool and potentially infinite amount of memetic

seizure of that. finite squish pool I was going to say limited processing power it's not nearly as flowery the I think that the I'm losing my words it's like the memetic units I'll be back in a second yeah it's just that like besides gross competition for portions of neuronal processing power, it's also the fact that not all memes are mutually exclusive. And, like, many of them can adapt by combining together, but some of them are mutually exclusive. Like, these initiative initiation structures,

like ones that are, you know, cultic, broadly understood, are ones that cannot survive significant pneumatic contamination because they have to force you into a particular track track that doesn't bear the existence of alternatives at the time, if you're nascent. And so versus ones that can combine, like the way we have, you know, the genome-absorbed retroviruses, you know, millions at various points in its evolution and used them to improve the efficient use of its productive faculties inside the cell as opposed to having them hijacked. Like there's as well as like gross competition for scarce and mutually exclusive uses of resources there's this sort of

I don't know, trans-Darwinian element to it. Well, I don't, I accept the content of all you're saying, like there is symbiosis and of course the Cambrian explosion is an explosion of symbiosis I mean, our mitochondria are hijacked or adopted pro-caroates so, you know it's highly germane But the notion that it somehow takes us out of the Darwinian frame, I think, is more questionable. I mean, a symbiotic constellation is just another unit of potential competition. It's not somehow exempted from the whole economy of competition.

competition. There's only a certain amount of mitochondrial DNA that can be generated given a set of resource constraints. And so if it wants to push those boundaries, it will require competition with something else. This is why, to go right back to this Malthusian, fundamental Malthusian insight in that if you have supply class you have inevitable competition. There's just no two ways around that. The way he sets up in the mishmacks between fertility

and resources is a concrete example, but the general principle is more abstract. And it's just if you have extreme, let's say, geometric propagation on the production side, then you have to have some kind of, there will be, it's like that movie title, there will be blood. However it happens, by being driven to starvation, actual conflict, various ways in which you can be pushed out of niches, this whole conversion thing, which of course is some form of just

absolute usurpation of certain kind of resources by a new model. There's no doubt a zillion different ways this can happen. You can't predict all the ways it happens. But what you can is that there will be some kind of irreducible of competition. It's just not possible. Sure. But what we said, you were saying before, about the expansion into extraplanetary space, this seems like something which is also radically transformed by that access to resources. Because it's not just space that ceases to become scarce when we get off the planet. It's also, to a huge astronomical,

no pun intended, extent, mass and energy. And so it seems like at that point, so we can definitely say that it's inevitable that it re-arises, but we can maybe make the further point that it has to be something which is not simply Malthusian, that it has to be more abstract, because at a certain point, we just have to invoke the filter. like why is it that we don't see all of these surviving, thriving endlessly mass propagating technological civilizations in the universe like if there are self-limiting factors they don't appear to be Malthusian like maybe we tend towards overly homogenous universal forms that are then vulnerable

to some kind of specific fault by necessity or maybe things are able to vary too much and highly successful strategies don't propagate enough, and then when the secretive, warlike, neighbouring technological civilisation comes calling, we die because we don't have the right strategies heavily propagated. I mean, whatever it is, it's not necessarily Malthusian. It almost seems like it can't be Malthusian once you expand into an entire solar system's worth of resources. Well, sorry, there's two things going on there. If you're saying that the Greek filter argument caps, Malthus, then I mean I don't have an immediate response, I have to think about it. It's like a really interesting... If you're saying the mere expansion into this vast

resource globe caps it, that I'm skeptical about. I'm skeptical because you're only pushing beyond Malthus if there is some massively asymmetric effect on the supply and demand side of this. If supply of variation remains constant and demand for variation massively expands, then sure, you could potentially exit from this map using that. But why would we think that that asymmetry existed? Isn't every new increment of resources you get available for the propagation of even more

vast abundant supply models. Isn't your supply exploding at least as fast as your... Only not on the scale of human reproduction and organization. We're still talking about that. We're talking about these memetic configurations of variable units, whatever it is, aren't we? The thing that's evolved from these new cells in the Cambrian Explosion Government. I mean, that explosion even intensifies, doesn't it, when you get into these vast resource fields outside the tourist world.

isn't there even more stuff now trying to get itself into memory? It seems like that would not necessarily but it seems like the archetypes of what you're describing would be Grey Goo and the Paper Clipper unless we're talking about a sort of like minimally monoform kind of gray goo that converts everything into Computronium and then just lets other kinds of memes and information structures run free and vary with maximal processing speed and relaxation of constraints and then fills this sort of simulation space

thereby limited, or thereby provided, which I mean, it's definitely a boundary case. It's kind of hard to imagine directly, but then I guess I definitely see that there is like an intersection of the filter in Malthusianism where the availability of Greygu and Paper Clipper strategies once you hit this giant resource mountain leads to the extinction of variety? Something along those lines? I mean, it just... But in both of those models, there's a kind of assumption of homogeneity that I'm not sure where... I'm not totally sure where that's coming from. Okay, there's, you know, inertially we're assuming that everything we're trying to replicate.

But I mean, there seems to be as you go up this process an increasing sort of non-linear trend to the deliberate cultivation of variety. I mean, you know, like when a business clones itself across the world, okay, McDonald's maybe will try and do roughly the same thing in every place, but I mean, the more complicated the organism or the entity, the more it's likely to actually deliberately cultivate variation rather than just pump out these homogenous replications, especially since as you said it's we already know that that kind of monoculture

is a security thing so if we already know that you know that's going to be that's part of the security calculation of this thing whatever it is no that makes sense I guess what I'm arguing is that you only have at most very local, relative, and not universal Malthusian conditions in the freely available solar system until all of its resources are maximized. Maybe you have stuff that does not have the technological wherewithal to get off of Mars, and so those things are competing for Mars. But on a larger scale, until at least the majority

of the resources in the solar system are converted, maximized, exploited, whatever which is like a huge threshold then prior to that you would see competition and selection and so forth and that competition and selection could not and would not be on purely Malthus driven grounds You're saying that you're looking for another source of competition yeah I can see that I think I can see that like a more maybe more paranoid security oriented set of incentives eliminating eliminating threats Yeah, which is maybe

a way of sort of looking at you have to invoke the filter because the filter becomes a kind of driving abstract or horizon where you're driven to compete with things before they are actually competing for scarce resources with you like it's a mode of generalized internalized preemption. So you're saying, if I can just recap, because I'm getting this more clearly, is that the great filter implies forms of competition of a non-Malthusian type because there seems to be much more threat elimination than abundance when we look out into the universe.

When I say abundance, not abundant resources, actual abundant variation seems very small, whereas threat elimination seems to be happening in those things. Right, and so which necessarily prioritizes on an arbitrarily large timescale, or small timescale, on arbitrary timescales. seeking to optimize structure, and if you think your structure is optimal, propagate that optimal structure in advance of running into resource limits because at all times you are subject to this filter which does not seem to be Malthusian in character. Like, there must be, there are, there are other and arbitrarily other and large kinds of survival threats that you need to preemptively optimize for,

and that means competition in excess of that, which is driven by resource scarcity. Okay. Sorry, I can't actually hear you very well on this phone, and so if I'm talking over you by accident, I apologize. No, not at all. Not at all, and I get this point now. It's definitely very interesting. I'm also just kind of making light, crystallizing it as I go along, so it's not necessarily like you didn't get it before I didn't. I hadn't fleshed it out either. Yeah. I recovered my thought from a few minutes ago. I think it might be able to be related to that. I think it's kind of orthogonal. So I was thinking about, so if we assume there is some type of scarcity or competition, and we have these cells or territories which are competing

and trying to, even in extreme cases, trying to decode or take over each other's territories, versus a Cambrian explosion of government, which implies all this new variety in the forms of government. So if there's a limited playing field, and you have a Cambrian explosion on that playing field, that would imply the miniaturization of each of the cells. Since their kind of scale independent or the scale is arbitrary, I'm not sure if there's a way to decide if a larger territory or a smaller territory is preferable. and so like you could say right now we have large homogenous territories and if there were to be a Cambrian

explosion they would shrink more and more which also ephemeralizes them yeah I mean that's an interesting question and it relates to this point that James Wan was making about are we expecting convergence or divergence. I mean, obviously if we look at we can't treat the Cambrian explosion entirely as a kind of prediction but one obvious striking feature of it is that you end up with massive heterogeneity but I guess also extremely important forms of convergence. I mean,

I'm sure someone with the expertise to comb through everything, all the fallout from the Cambrian explosion, would find an extremely impressive amount of convergent features in that, as well as all the prolific heterogeneity that has come from it. So, it's just to say, in terms of connecting it with your point, maybe scale too, it's like that. you know I mean maybe we would get a lot of miniaturization but only because we're getting more variety in general and so this is a kind of comparatively unexplored zone is fast proliferation of extreme small

autonomous political units and so it's a natural if you're if you're increasing variation in all dimensions then that's one dimension go down but it doesn't necessarily mean it might but it doesn't necessarily mean that we're converging universally upon nano upon its I mean it's might be that just adding adding to this heterogeneous mix a political units different scales. Certainly I think if you look at historical

periods where there was less consolidation medieval Italy or whatever, they did tend to be smaller didn't they? So maybe as a, certainly in the short term as a product of catabolic geopolitics you would expect to see, you would expect the model to be on smaller states rather than enormous ones. I suppose, yeah, and you've also got things to consider, like there'd be bootstrapping in terms of people. It's not like they would start out with a massive population or massive resources, but I don't know whether maybe it would be the case that small states with smaller populations would find it

easier to adapt and to pick up on changes of structures or institutions that have been found to be efficient whereas if you've got a population of 100 million it might be more difficult to adapt, or I suppose it depends on your political model. Yeah. Anyway. Sorry, if you can run with the metaphor, right, so medieval Italian city-states are coexisting with the Holy Roman Empire, right, and then other sort of things like the Hanseatic League and so on, right?

You really have more of an ecosystem of states in a way, right? You know, like you could argue that the Westphalian normalization is a sort of anomaly, I guess. Like this idea that we have one state sort of form which is highly normalized is... Right. Historically apparent. Right. Yeah. I think what I'm trying to say is that the idea of scale starts to break down when we're

talking about holographic cells of government or territory. So if you were just, if we're talking about brain turf, to make it a little more concrete, you can have one body per person, you can have an individual, or you could have like an AI or like a demon where it's, a hive mind where it's inhabiting many bodies and it's just a slice of each one of those bodies, a slice of each one of those brains. And I think when you're talking about a territory in this really abstract holographic cell way, it becomes impossible to decide whether the hive consciousness is better than the individual person consciousness in terms of people consensually

agreeing to form that type of government or consciousness with each other. And so then as you have the atomization of the slices of people's brains that are beholden to different aspects of different governments that they participate in, you also have the growth of the trans-personal entities at the same time. So they're getting bigger and smaller at the same time. And I think the scale stops making sense somehow. Right. But is that not actually strongly comparable to what happens biologically in the biological Cambrian expansion? Oh yeah, that makes sense.

That also is very interesting. I mean, is it that we now have bigger, larger organisms that we didn't have before. There are ecosystems that are units of organization. You can see the whole thing is still a cell propagation. It's multi-level analysis, isn't it, that is really simplified to certain privileged scales. But it's questionable whether you're really catching anything at any of that risk. Is a large scale animal organism actually the basic unit or is it a colony, is it some kind of colonial experiment that makes more sense

ultimately at some other scale. You know, like a way in which mitochondria propagate themselves in some kind of semi-organized collective. Yeah, it's impossible to tell if it's the location of real agency or a shift in the frame of analysis. Yeah. Where I said in the sidebar, it's impossible to tell if convergence and divergence are the same in this case, or if those are actually two different possibilities. Yeah. So how are people feeling about time?

I'm sort of slowly backing my way out. But I'm not going to just abruptly leave. I mean, are people feeling that we've kind of done OK time-wise, or are there some more crucial points waiting at this point? Yeah, I'm hitting the wall myself. yeah I mean I don't I I'd I hope to catch as many of you guys as possible in there second module this but

I don't at the moment have much inflation about the 70 gonna be a hiatus and so I'm not sure I mean I'm really grateful to everyone whose been involved in this thing and I hope to see you all for the second part of it. I wish I could provide more information than I can. But have a good summer in the interim anyway, guys. And yeah, there is still, if anyone wants to throw something into the ring at this last minute, that definitely can be done. I would throw something in, actually.

This project I've been working on, the Transliminal Earth Alliance Meta-Narrative, or TEAM, I think it's... I've been working on it for a while, and when I read about this class description, I was blown away because I felt like I've been working on the same thing except in practice. So we've been researching basically what we've been discussing, but we haven't had this kind of language for it at all because we've been doing it in the imminent social relations of building a post-occupied decentralization movement. And yeah, so if anyone's interested in that or if we want to bring that into the discussion as an example at some point. Well, and is anything that you've got like that

you can use the classroom thing to promulgate information to everyone here. I think everyone's still going to be able to get into that. So I definitely encourage you to do that. That would be great. Yeah. Yeah, we've found mostly convergence there. We were all shocked at the level of convergence we found. It's really strange. Yes, I mean, I think this is a huge and interesting question, and a lot of the political heat is about this, of course. Like, you know, I think there's lots of scepticism about some of this seasteading stuff, which is not silly.

I mean, it's interesting criticism, which is to say, you know, it's promoted as if it is this great wave of divergence, but actually the real agenda is towards convergence. You know, and I think I'm repeating what people have already said, that there's some kind of implicit notion that some minichistic, hard libertarian microstate is actually going to kick everyone's ass and totally sweep the board. But the conditions for that to happen require that people are first of all sold on this kind of massive luxury and explosion of all these other kind of social models. I mean I think that criticism is not to be lightly dismissed, I mean I think it's an

interesting point to make. So that's obviously one of the ways this convergence-divergence question goes. Yeah, I'm about to now depart. So for everyone who's still with me, thanks. And have a good... I don't know. I'm normally like this. It's normally late at night, but now I'm in the middle of the day. So wherever you are in space-time, whatever it is. Well, I might go to sleep now, even though it's the middle of the day here. Good night. Yeah, okay. Bye. Thanks.

Bye. Bye. See you soon as possible. Bye. Thank you.

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