Post #15: Proposing Three Upgrades
Post #15: Proposing Three Upgrades
I met this person named Cleo the other day. Cleo got her masters in public policy then did non-profit work focused on increasing renewable energy usage. By the time I met her, she had given up that work and joined a cloud company as a salesperson.
She makes more money in the sales role, but has lost her interest in contributing to civilization. Over the years of not being well compensated doing her non-profit work, she was driven to a less civilizationally valuable role- at least as judged by Cleo’s expressed feelings towards her cloud sales position. Not only that, but Cleo expressed not having the motivation to contribute to civilization at all anymore. I was struck by that because it felt like a 180 from her commitment to public policy education and then her non-profit work. She said that if she had it her way, she wouldn’t have to work at all.
This anecdote makes it seem like the way our current COS defines value discouraged her from pursuing a more meaningful path.
Can we create an operating system that incentivizes Cleo to do the civilizationally more valuable work of combating climate change instead of slinging cloud services?
It’s time to start painting a clearer picture. Up until now, this substack has mostly been an exploration of what’s running civilization, problems with the current operating system, and hints at possible solution paths. Now that we have our conceptual feet underneath us, it’s time to start standing up.
The premise of this post is that we can leverage the internet along with features of web3 to do a better job than our current COS at this process: 1) Clarify our mission 2) Select the right strategy & prioritize projects 3) Incentivize ourselves to execute those projects. I’m going to call this process “civilizationing.”
Our current COS relies on a variety of legacy institutions including religions, governments, and the economy for civilizationing. By leveraging modern tools, we can create a civilizational operating system that is significantly more effective at directing our attention towards valuable activities than our current institutions.
Starting Fresh
As the last post pointed out, one problem with our current COS is this “symbolic error” where over time money stops equaling value. This error implicates the entire COS, because it means either we have a bad definition of value that renders our symbols meaningless, or we have a good definition of value but it gets ineffectively translated into symbols. Or more likely some combination of the two.
Regardless of the exact cause, we have to fix this error. We need a definition of value that is meaningful and we need it translated into an incentive system that works.
The path to fixing the error does not include overhauling our existing institutions. They are covered in millennia of complexity and are more stuck in their ways than the oldest of dogs. And do not confuse government projects to “digitize” their operations with upgrading civilization’s operating system. You can change your desktop background as many times as you like, but until you add new code you’re still running Windows 98.
The path to fixing money’s symbolic error and upgrading our COS lies in creating a new paradigm for civilizationing. We will not use our existing institutions to pick the mission and define value, select tasks, and incentivize ourselves. We will build a new web3-based system to upgrade our COS.
It’s worth noting that while this new paradigm will be built using the internet and web3, it will borrow many elements from the existing institutions. Concepts like democracy, ownership, and faith will be part of this new system. Point being, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, our current COS has a lot of good “code” that we should carry over.
What’s This New System Look Like?
Each of the three main functions of our COS- clarify our mission, set the strategy, and execute- needs to be included in the new version.
Here’s an updated image that includes three additions to our COS.
The first is an “interpreter” to accompany the function of science. Science observes existence, but does not interpret the meaning of its findings. That lack of interpretation is because science hasn’t evolved an interpreter yet, not because it shouldn’t have one. We need a robust system that takes in all the observations or “existential evidence” collected by science, and synthesizes that data into an interpretation or a story as to our existential positioning. Done well, this interpretation would generate a mission statement for civilization by answering “where are we / why are we here / what should we do?”
The second addition is Coordinating Code. This software layer will enable people to effectively coordinate with each other without the need for human bias in the middle, or in the current case government officials. The governance strategy for this code will be interesting to determine, likely starting how most DAOs govern code changes today via some type of majority voting mechanism.
The third addition is an Idea Economy. In an Idea Economy, the most meaningful and progressive ideas humanity has at any given time are what gets worked on. An Idea Economy wouldn’t have been possible before a communications network like the internet as it requires civilization-wide real time communication. Without such communication, we wouldn’t be able to collect all the best ideas let alone prioritize which ones should be worked on. This new economy can 1) financially incentivize people all the around the world to submit proposals 2) subject those proposals to a financially incentivized speculation market a la Futarchy to prioritize them 3) place a token bounty on each selected proposal to incentivize entrepreneurs to complete the projects and build the future.
What’s Next
The next few posts will dive into the details of each proposed upgrade. How will the interpreter work? How will the coordinating code be governed? How will the ideas economy function?
What’s this substack all about?
We need to upgrade our civilization’s operating system. This newsletter is a research project that explores how our current operating system came to be, which improvements would be helpful, and how we can make an upgrade happen. This substack’s goal is to land on a project that can be built to upgrade our civilization’s operating system.
I chose to write this publicly to get feedback on these ideas. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. Upgrading our COS and building our future is a team effort.
I liked your Cleo example very much. It aptly describes the problem. But ultimately Cleo didn’t want to work. Perhaps that was her underlying disposition and not a function of her being sidetracked from a meaningful career path to a more lucrative one lacking meaning. One of the problems with any analysis is that we have strayed far from essences. Imagine the first tribe that had each member doing something that furthered the tribe’s s interests. Then over time with the advent of more tribes a medium of exchange was needed to promote economy. It likely worked well for a while but eventually people played games with the production end and with the money until it reached a point where nobody knew what the money was for or what it was really worth but they just kept on going with the inertia of it all. It is a complex situation with many moving parts. I applaud your effort to deal with it.