There Are Many Alternatives: Unlocking Civilizational Hypercomplexity with Ethereum by Venkatesh Rao

foreign [Music] it's kind of complicated to introduce myself so you can go to my website I'm basically a blogger and a couple of other things and I promise you this is the only meme I'll throw at you ah so I do write a blog a newsletter and so on and this is going to be a pretty abstract talk at a fairly high level but I do have like at least some experience dabbling at a very Hands-On beginner level so I'm coming from somewhere as in it's not up in the cloud so if you're interested I did a long thread last year about my initial explorations of web3 stuff okay so the title of my talk there are many Alternatives it's a reference to Margaret Thatcher's famous line there is no alternative she popularized it I think starting in 1980 and it became the catchphrase of neoliberalism and the basic idea was that as communism was beginning to get discredited there was increasingly no alternative to the idea of Western liberal Democratic ways of running countries with free markets and the institutions that came with it and it became sort of the core of what became known as the Washington consensus so so those of you who need the Short History lesson this was a consensus before blockchain type consensuses and this was the set of practices that the World Bank and IMF used to sort of dictate to countries how they should run their economies and this was around 1989 and as the Cold War ended the thesis became more than an economic thesis and it leveled up into a sort of philosophical historical thesis and one of the things that really helped this along was this book that came out in 91 called the end of history and the last man and it's widely misunderstood but it became sort of a justification for the idea that there is no alternative to the one way to run the world and of course as many of you remember a lot of people were very unhappy with the idea of there is a one single Playbook of how to run the world and I think of them as all teeners as in they don't really want a pluralist world with many systems competing on how to run it but they want to be the default alternative they want to be the way to run the world to which there is no alternative and some of them kind of like lost to history now but some of you may remember the anti-globalization protests and the world social Forum that came up in the late 90s Islamic Terror was another sort of alternate way of running the world in in the making uh what we now think of as Sovereign individualism type libertarianism the original book actually came out in the late 90s before uh blockchain stuff and of course the Chinese model and deng's model of running an alternate to the Western model came up around them so I Define Athena or there is no alternative Theory as a kind of Maxi thesis it's the idea that one winner take all convergent future will dominate the rest of history and again is Bruno Mars In This Crowd so you should attend his talk since he's written a book called the history history's beginning and I'm sure he has more to say about it but I think a lot of the use of fukuyama's ideas in the sort of there is no alternative kind of tier Rising is is basically wrong but okay let's start the story for this talk with Bitcoin and I think of Bitcoin as the alt libertarian Tina Playbook with extra steps so I don't have much more to say about Bitcoin but ethereum I think is not a Tina Theory right it seems to enable many Divergent stories even within itself and in its relationships to other things right so within the ethereum universe you've got artists with their nfts you've got defy degens like going for yield farming and these are very very different types of people they're not like you know when you talk to bitcoin Maxis you expect them to be eating beef reading the same books and start spouting the same ideology when you talk to ethereum people if you picked one at random you have no idea what you'll get you could get like a far left person into art you could get a far right person who's kind of like indistinguishable from bitcoiners so that's what you get with ethereum and it seems to coexist well with things outside ethereum as well like you know the traditional legal system it has ways of like interoperating with them and so forth okay let's give that property a name I'm going to call it hyper complexity it's the property of a system that allows it to sustain many mutually in commensurate Divergent narrative Futures at the same time I wanted to read it out at least once and by mutually in commensurate that's kind of a quasi-mathematical way of saying it but it means you cannot judge one story by another story you cannot judge whether a lot of the Rings is a good story based on whether you like Harry Potter or not because they have different Aesthetics they have different narrative Logics right so why hyper instead of you know all the other prefixes and I think that's what the note lots of other things call themselves hyper all are interesting to look into Timothy Martin's hyper objects climate change is an example Adam Curtis's hyper normalization is sort of the opposite of what I'm talking about right now uh Nick Clan from the far right he has this notion of a hyperstition which is um it's kind of like a self-loaffling prophecy of a superstition computer science has an idea of a hypervisor and I'm an aerospace engineer and I like things that slice faster than Mark's life so that's Hypersonic but the reference I'm most sort of uh inspired by is the idea of hyperbolic geometry so here's the mnemonic image for those of you who don't know what it is regular geometry which you learned in high school happens on a plane if you have a line and you pick a point outside it there's only one line you can draw draw through it that's euclidean geometry and non-euclidean geometries mess with the parallel postulate and you get two basic versions so if you have space time that's positively curved like the sphere on the top you get a situation where there are no possible parallel lines so the equivalent of a straight line in a sphere is a great circle and if you pick a point outside the great circle and try to draw another great circle that does not intersect the first one it's not possible so I like to think of that as a motif for there is no alternative whereas hyperbolic geometry on negatively curved spaces if you have a straight line and then you pick a point outside it you can draw an infinite number of other straight lines through it so think of this as The Motif for hyper complexity here okay so why is hyper complexity important and I claim that hyper complexity allows open-ended evolution and it is the sort of substance of civilizational advances whereas the opposite which is there is no alternative single monolithic States approaching Perfection are a sign of evolutionary dead ends or bottlenecks and my hypothesis is that history evolves when smooth Tina periods kind of trigger discontinuous hyper complexity leaps it's similar to the idea of punctuated equilibrium biology okay some justification since it's kind of like a wild big claim so this is from Parkinson's law uh management classic and there's a lot of evidence for the idea that um you know when a system approaches Perfection it's at the point of collapse Perfection is finality Perfection is death so system approaching that state is about to collapse and die I hope you can see some connections to things that were said earlier in the morning and Tim had to slide up yesterday and yeah it made me grit my teeth because it makes my talk a little harder and I just took this picture in the morning with Danny stock and I thought the headline was perfect perfect with them a finality and maybe Perfection and collapse and death I hope not okay let's see if we can find a way out of that so I love this definition of um civilizational advances by the philosopher Whitehead civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them so basically the idea is civilization is a series of automations of important things okay so maybe protocol Perfection can also be a foundation for an ecosystem hyper-complexity leak so that's sort of the wild speculative hypothesis here yeah so a major category of important operations is basically dealing with conflict amongst mutually Divergent narratives right many stories are being told how do you actually deal with conflict an example is religions that compete for believers and promise different afterlives right and for thousands of years we did not actually have a good way of dealing with this and freedom of religion you can think of it as a whitehead advance that automates this particular important operation and in this conference of like 3000 people uh some subset of you are in this room I'm sure that many religions and many levels of sincerity and religious belief are represented and there's a lot of atheists but fundamentally we sort of figured out about 300 400 years ago what it takes for multiple religions to live in the same area without killing each other right so we've replaced religious wars with a kind of pluralist piece an example a list of examples of Whitehead advances so I've compiled this from a bunch of sources you can see that at the bottom the first three are from fukuyama's other book really good I strongly recommended if you're interested in these topics the origins of political order the first three are civilizational leaps that really allowed more and more Divergent stories to live in the same region or Nation or country right strong centralized State rule of law which is a very different idea than rule by law if they're just laws that's not enough you need everybody to be under the law some people cannot be above the law so that's rule of law and China even though it innovated a strong Central State it did not develop and still has not developed rule off law it has ruled by law and that developed in Egypt India and later on through Europe then accountable government forgiveness is an idea Hannah Arendt points out is kind of a novel Innovation that came out of Christianity that took us from a regime of like Vendetta filled stories of like you know killing each other in tit-for-tat stories to much more plural stories where maybe you didn't have to kill each other maybe forgiveness and they're moving forward is a way separation of religion and state this is a fairly recent idea Spinoza in the 1670s actually had to kind of invent the idea and States had to kind of be developed on the basis of that modern markets I strongly suggest you read Brad delong's new book that just came out slouching towards Utopia and of course what we're talking about here I think crypto is actually one such civilizational Advance or leap and I think there's another big contender in the world today which is machine learning and it's kind of interesting that we have these two things and I was tweeting a while ago that maybe crypto is the first foundation and machine learning is the second Foundation like you know in asimov's Psycho history okay so let's put all these things together what's the connection between complexity hyper complexity ossification civilizational advances lots of big wig terms let's start with complexity and there's like lots and lots of different ways to think about complexity I'm not going to be talking about all of these but happy to like sidebar with anybody who's interested I could talk for an hour on each of these all are the technical ways these are all technical ways there are social and Humanities ways of thinking about complexity but I'll go with technical um and the one I want to like highlight for understanding our topic is one known as skinifin it's pronounced skinnifin it's a Scottish word it looks like sinophen but it's skinfen and it was developed by this guy Dave Snowden and this is the picture it thinks of systems in the um within this framework of four regimes of clear complicated complex and chaotic and they're each described by pattern of constraints and a pattern of how to operate effectively within them so if you work backwards from chaotic chaotic systems lack of constraint and the bits and pieces are highly decoupled which means you have like stories that can evolve that are like disconnected and mutually in commensurate like I said and the best way to act within them is kind of adventurously so you know act sense respond that's the phrase they use which is kind of like living dangerously you could die once you get to complex regimes you have slightly Loosely coupled systems so it's no longer decoupled and you have a more experimental regime where you can do like you know trial and error and it won't always kill you and there's a opportunity to learn and evolve without killing yourself then you get to complicate it where constraints start to get tightly coupled and you're in a sense analyze respond regime where think of it as you have to look at a situation model it analyze it you know with spreadsheets and equations and everything and chances are if you think clearly and do it well it actually won't require much trial and error or you know killing yourself and finally clear it's a completely constrained system there are no degrees of freedom there is no alternative and all you can do is look at reality sense it categorize it and respond you're almost an automaton you're a bot okay let's map this to everything we've talked about so far so the Whitehead definition of civilization I think maps to the path from chaotic to clear right you have a chaotic system you add a little bit more thinking and advancing and it becomes a complex system where it's still hard to manage then it becomes a complicated system and then finally it becomes a clear system where it's been fully automated and you don't have to think about it anymore and the right half of that kind of two by two is the there is no alternative regime right complicated plus clear that's what things that there are no alternative to look like if you look at the neoliberal world order and the Washington consensus World bank's Playbook imf's Playbook that looks like the part on the right there is no alternative it's a complicated and in some places clear thing and of course if you want to add the idea that towards Perfection you get collapsed have a leap a red leap from clear to chaotic where a system approaches perfection acquires fragility collapses and then you're back in chaos all right so this is how I think of hyper complexity this is the picture on which it evolves so the question is can we eliminate crisis Pathways in this whole process of evolving hyper complexity can we have smoothly increasing hyper complexity without these you know there is no alternative bottlenecks and my belief is no you cannot maybe you guys think differently but but can we at least reshape crisis Pathways so I went from Green but not quite red so an orange pathway I think of this as equivalent to the question can you do the equivalent of asimovian psycho history and my belief is yeah maybe you can do it this is sort of a very janky work in progress definition but the idea is if you respond to a looming crisis by tweaking the system at an axiomatic level somehow maybe the big crisis becomes a small crisis or even a no crisis and maybe because of that you benefit by getting a period where hyper complexity can grow right and examples are Y2K a crisis that turned out not to be the Montreal protocol for ozone that worked pretty well sort of like backsliding now and ozone is back as a problem some types of corporate self-disruptions seem to work like Netflix moving from you know DVDs to streaming the merge I think I would still put a question mark on it has it actually hit the category of um this definition same with a lot of things happening in say climate change like Renewables or carbon capture and note that this is not resilience or accelerationism which are two other ways of thinking about this problem resilience is you make yourself Tough Enough and redundant enough that you can sort of power through the crisis and come out maybe a little broken and battered but you're still alive that's resilience accelerationism is you believe that the system today is so corrupt it deserves to die and you floor the accelerator and burst through the crisis and you come out the other side maybe you know superhuman and a lot of the accelerationists it started as a right-wing philosophy now there's a left accelerationism as well but this is neither resilience nor accelerationism this is what I think of as exactation so you know adapting to something kind of before it happens so this is where I think it maps to this is another slight stolen from Tim yesterday so we had a candidate hyper-complexity leap starting and before ossification maybe we will enjoy a period of hyper complexity growth and that's a pretty blurry picture but that's about as blurry as my understanding so I'm fine with that how do you design for this process of like you know hopefully reshaped hyper complexity evolution so in search of design principles you can think of like the spirit of the design principles first so first thing I want to do is infer what I hyper complexity is like from historical examples not theories so the list of examples I looked at before you know like development of the state the emergence of Christianity things like that it's not the original Tina Playbook of neoliberalism it's not the Silicon Valley Playbook some of you may recognize the phrase breaking smart I wrote a set of essays while working with Andresen Horowitz about seven years ago and that's the Silicon Valley Playbook I sincerely believe what we're entering now is no longer the Silicon Valley Playbook uh and of course um what all the other alternate playbooks the Socialist one the libertarian one I think they're all kind of like not candidates here so right now I'm just thinking through the phenomenology that I think is important in hyper complexity it needs theorizing and I added those last two points as I was listening this morning I love the idea of subtraction over addition and a surprise to hear so many mentions of infinite game over finite game I'm really pleased to hear that because James cars is one of my favorite authors and I had the Good Fortune to uh be in a salon where he spoke a few weeks before he died so one of the last opportunities to hear him and one of the interesting things was I had assumed he would be kind of this very spiritual theological philosophy a philosophical guy who would um I don't know I had a certain picture in my head but it turns out he's a jock at one point in his life he was an athlete a football player and it was really sort of like you know narrative violation for me but when he thinks about finite and infinite games he literally comes from a background of real Sports and games and it's when we talk about like you know hyper games on top of ethereum you really should actually think about real games as well not like an abstract Game Theory a starting point so I've been sort of collecting I've been thinking about these things for like several years and those of you have been talking to you know that I can go on at length about several of these so for example mediocrity over Excellence is one of the points that gets me in the most trouble I've written a 12 Bar blog series about it uh so if you want to argue with me you're going to have to read that first I like this idea of like you know there's a lot of bureaucracy and bureaucracy gets a bad name but you know you guys have things that sound extremely bureaucratic and that's a good thing eip1234 or whatever I love it and I like the idea of bureaucracy over monarchs Messiahs and mobs and this principle it's kind of like a port of an old ietf principle that says something like we don't believe in Kings or democracy we believe in rough consensus and running code I think we need an update of that and that might be a good one fat overlaid I've written a bunch about it I want to say a little bit about the seventh one which is entangled fan outs over you Forks sorry I don't know if I'm allowed to say that to you but the idea that you know became popular in the last 10 years a good idea of like you know exit over voice it's sort of went cancerous and now everybody is like exiting from each other and it's like you know a few I'm going to create my own future over there and I think that's gotten unhealthy and really I love what I see in the ethereum community so yesterday in the r d Workshop it was a funny thing happened they had the big room and when the two breakout sessions started there was this group on one end I have a photo I meant to put it in but I couldn't at a fine time but in one room one end of the room there was a bunch of people discussing some complex number Theory and in the other end some really janky practical implementation stuff on software and the room hadn't really been designed for that so both started talking loudly and then there was some crosstalk and there was some joking and then both started speaking very softly and I think that is yeah you're exploring many Futures with like a fork of um a garden of forking paths but they're not like independent and exiting from each other they're entangled so I think of that as you know entangled fan out is about the phrase I'm thinking of so fan as in like you know things diverging not fanatic and if you extrapolate that to the global level you really kind of want to go towards planetary mutualism as opposed to you know Sovereign individualism which seems to be the maybe it's bitcoin's influence but Sovereign individualism seems to be the popular default philosophy in the crypto world I think planetary mutualism is what it should be and what ethereum should lean towards a bunch of others happy to talk to anybody who's interested in any of these they could go on for hours about this uh I have a couple of minutes left I do want to acknowledge a bunch of people so a lot of this thinking actually for the last couple of years it's been happening at this group I belong to the collective we have a Monday morning distributed systems group that discusses kind of more technical uh stuff and a Friday morning study group that talks about like you know online governance and social stuff so if you're interested please do join us and I do want to like shout out to all the people I've listed there so John Miguel K Rafa John many others um all the people who helped me not make a complete ass of myself as I was exploring these topics starting a couple of years ago I have been around the ethereum ecosystem as a lurker since the beginning but I only really got into it a couple of years ago and of course thanks to Tim and vitalik for a bunch of helpful conversations so it's like I ended with a minute to spare so thank you very much