A Brief Response to @edicted
@edicted had a post a few days ago (Winning is Secondary). I’d started doing a reply, but it ended up as this post.
His post was mostly about the scarcity mindset and how abundance can/will upset and disrupt the status quo.
A few responses to his thoughts:
If you win isn't it intrinsically implied that someone else loses? Is that how we want to live our lives?
On the backs of those we've dominated?
I know several people who would say 'yes' without even thinking about it. Once we get into a certain mindset it can be difficult to change.
At its most egregious, this was evident in centuries of chattel slavery. Nominally illegal now, slavery is still very much among us
And the light colors shown for the advanced economies might well underestimate the incidence of sexual slavery.
But that’s just the overt forms of slavery; @edicted, @taskmaster4450, @tarazkp, and others have written about the perniciousness of wage slavery.
Aren't we trying to build abundance? Everyone complains that AI is going to take all the jobs. The logic is non-sensical given an abundance mindset. If we are living in abundance and don't have to worry about our next score it doesn't really matter if AI takes our job. That job probably sucked anyway. Did you really want to be doing THAT forever?
Exactly. Many people might not admit it to themselves, but they’re modern-day Luddites. If your dull repetitive job can be done by some combination of machine and artificial intelligence technologies, you really should be moving up the food chain and doing something more fulfilling and less soul-crushing.
We are not that far away from machines literally doing all the basic work for us. Food, water, and shelter. Once that's covered the entire game changes. Of course we then have to wonder how an exponential explosion of the population would be circumvented, but crypto and the governance therein likely already has a lingering answer.
Well, I don’t think that given near universal abundance, an exponential explosion of the population would be a problem. Globally, birth rates have been falling for decades and are already below replacement rates in many countries. Historically, people had many children to provide workers (for both subsistence farming and for the cash economy) and to care for them when they got older, if they survived that long. Widespread abundance would likely significantly reduce those demands for extra people.
If crypto does what it's supposed to do then the network becomes more powerful than any centralized government. At that point the network makes the rules and the network becomes the government.
My only quibble with this is that I would have used networks rather than network. A decade or two down the road, we’re probably headed for You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
It's easy to forget that we should strive to create cooperative systems that build value for everyone rather than cannibalizing the poor.
We’ve already been seeing the early stages of this within the Hive ecosystem. We’re seeing how important it’s becoming in countries as diverse as Cuba, Ghana, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
The scarcity mindset is deeply embedded in most of us, with strong evolutionary roots. Winter is coming and our food supplies are running low, maybe we can do without that slow guy.
So an abundance mindset will be a tough adjustment for many. I’m guessing that younger people will have an easier time making the necessary mental adjustments, but that once the possibilities of abundance start to spread, older cohorts will embrace them.
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Always love a good comment/post.
The potentialities that this blockchain opens for citizens not only of countries living a chronic crisis such as Cuba, but of anyone, are —although my knowledge of the whole crypto environment is not so comprehensive— singular, or at least "rare". It's not easy to achieve good results, takes time, but if people do the task and show respect for the platform it will show you its better face. I withdrew about 200 dollars in the first half of the year, which has been a huge boost to my family economy, if not to live as comfortably as I would like, then to sustain a balance in the midst of a violent inflationary context. Not to mention that the same balance has gone to stake in Hive. Nice posts both from you and @edicted.
It was interesting at the beginning of the pandemic the extent to which ordinary people cared for each other and became more concerned that the people around them were okay. Of course, there were some people who were not like this, but many were. I think we have other ties that bind us, apart from "money" - social interaction and belonging, co-operation etc. That's our human nature, if we must have such a thing.
Studies at the University of Leicester have demonstrated that co-operative behaviour and incentivising co-operative behaviour is hard-wired into our DNA: one of the reasons, they hypothesised, that we get mad when people cheat, in all its forms, such as cutting up other drivers.
Charles Darwin wrote about both co-operative and competitive behaviour in Origin of the Species, however, the competition part was convenient for capitalism (and patriarchy and white supremacy) so that's the bit that got lauded.
It is a challenge: in our Consortium where we are trying to operate differently, the external environment is about scarcity, competition for resources, essentially dividing people who have the same needs and interests. We have a day coming up in October where we will be sitting in a room together discussing how we can:
It's not easy, there's always the tragedy of the commons to contend with, but we are hopeful.