This brief takes a different form from any other you will find in the syllabus. This is because it is not possible to speak of the shape of shared dreams without consulting many different people and listening to multiple voices, opinions, perspectives and embodied experiences. As such, we invite Mihai Alisie, Karl Floersch, Rhea Myers, Virgil Griffith, Simon de la Rouviere, Kei Kreutler, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, and Sam Hart onto the stage to travel with us across time in order to try and throw a veil over the invisible hope we all share and thereby come to better know its shape.

The intention of this post is to touch on, and foreshadow, much of what we will discuss both this week, and in all the weeks to come. In particular, we hope it will help you understand more about:

From before Ethereum was even launched, the dream has been one defined by reflection, introspection, meaning, and shared value. Mihai writes that,

One could say that the outcome of all those early deliberations was that we decided it was much more fun, and much more interesting to make money, rather than to take profit. We mean this literally: Ethereum means you can make your own money, rather than suspend your disbelief in the fiction of somebody else’s. Mihai continues, pointing out that we are

As we stated last week in the play of pattern,

One means of beginning a random walk through all this unknown terrain is to jump forward in time to the early work of Karl Floersch, who suggests that,

However, ‘law’ suggests something substantive rather than formal, which means we're less interested in what we may do than in what we actually can do. Anyone can create law on Ethereum and, if you learn the language, you are effectively a member of the legislative branch. Moreover, the executive branch is just a network of computers which literally execute agreed upon costs for processing meaningful speech.

A good example of the difference between formal, prescriptive law and opt-in, substantive law can be found in the freedom of movement. Most modern democracies enshrine this freedom in a formal manner: anyone may travel across any public land as they please. However, you must still pay your own travel and accommodation costs. Therefore, in practice, such freedom can only be realised by a relatively small part of any population. Older communities framed the issue very differently: rather than formal freedom to move, they actively cultivated a culture of hospitality to strangers, as this ensures anyone genuinely can travel if they please. In this simplified example, one can begin to see how, in "convivial societies", mutual aid was the ground for individual autonomy, an idea we will return to in Module 4 and when we turn to wider perspectives on reciprocity.

The word ‘good’ here no longer implies some kind of moral stance: it has to do with the computable effects of any executable statement. This shift in how we imagine the word ‘law’ is most directly revealed in the way that it is impossible to “break” a law on Ethereum - given the executable and unambiguous language it is written in and the deterministic nature of the EVM - but it is possible not to follow a law.

Here is the heart of the whole “code is law” debate. As Rhea Myers says, interpreted literally, this is either a “libertarian attempt to reduce the costs and uncertainty of interpreting ambiguous human language, or a dystopian replacement of rights and safeguards with binary logic”. However, Karl is pointing at something different. We can reduce the costs to coordinate by limiting ambiguity in the language with which we transact, but global coordination requires the wider perspective that any transaction is opt-in: you need not sign transactions which interact with contracts to which you are unwilling to bind yourself. Understanding how this is neither libertarian nor purely logical requires learning a new language, which is done most effectively with the kind of radiant passion both Karl and Mihai embody.

Wittgenstein claims, “There are no genuine philosophical problems: just misunderstandings of language.” A world computing fabric can limit such misunderstandings in economic interactions, though it remains up to us, the people who sign, to define for ourselves what kinds of laws make our shared state meaningful. As Rhea says elsewhere, “Ethereum allows anyone to define what art is.” This is an idea we will return to in Module 4.

Karl’s post discusses the legislative and executive branches of government and suggests that, with “low cost opt-in laws that cannot be broken, for the first time we can easily apply the scientific method, trial and error, to governance”. However, this seems to neglect the judiciary. The function of the judiciary is to interpret law, resolve disputes, and assess the outcome of cases. Interpretation and assessment are no longer ideological problems in this new medium, though: they are engineering challenges. Disputes also operate differently, because

It's important to note that there are many critiques of this line of thought, especially when it is simplified for marketing purposes. In particular, we must ask if the elision of the judiciary does not correspond to a wider societal movement which sacrifices justice at the altar of efficiency. While the negative questioning and inevitably pessimistic response in this piece is at odds with Kernel, critics like Evgeny and Katrin remind us of two essential points:

This notion of discovering laws that are effective and fair for all leads us across time again to the work of Virgil Griffith, who writes that

His essay lays the foundation for understanding how such an environment can be used to warp traditional game theoretic conditions and goes on to show that, when we game warp non-cooperative games into coalitional ones, the rational choice becomes cooperation.

Of course, this cuts both ways, because games can be warped coercively just as easily as they can be moved towards prosocial outcomes. As we will suggest later in the course, the best remedy for this kind of insight is, quite simply, radically open knowledge, sharing, work and communication.

Another way of looking at the power which is unleashed by increasingly effective tools for organizing increasing numbers of people around shared goals is through the historical lens of joint stock companies and the idea of limited liability: which is really just another way we discovered to warp certain kinds of incentives. Simon de la Rouviere points out that

Such coordination systems could possibly circumvent nation state enforcement and its violent premises. As Simon writes elsewhere,

And such systems can be used to shift the incentives away from global coordination failure in mission critical games like climate change:

This kind of economic feedback loops incentivizes self-regulating ecosystems and creates the time needed for commons to heal. Understanding how technology ought to create more time to simply breathe together will be a core feature of Module 3.

Back in his joint stock pepe piece, Simon continues to suggest that,

In Simon's words, Ethereum is organisational “dark matter” that can coordinate galaxies of people, and it has the ability to create new Schelling points anchored in shared, tokenized stories.

Throughout all his work, Simon is suggesting that blockchains can be used to create systems of coordination equivalent to the power of a joint-stock corporation (and greater) without the requirement of physical force. Such coordination arises due to the stories shared within incentive structures which make it nearly impossible to change the narrative when it is convenient for those in power to do so. He writes that

The term ‘dark matter’ is particularly apt, because the exact consequences of such game warping and galactic-level coordination are difficult to predict and understand. The same was true, at a different scale, of joint stock companies. Simon notes as an example the complaint that, “Limited liability permits a man to avail himself of acts if advantageous to him, and not to be responsible for them if they should be disadvantageous; to speculate for profits without being liable for losses.”

This brings us to a more sober note, asking

Simon’s question is a deep one, and it recalls a notion we will return to in Module 6: the idea that systems like Mihai described - which aim for free, open and decentralized worlds - also require eternal vigilance. A critical part of this vigilance revolves around our moral imagination and the ability we have to craft technology - both internal and external - which is premised on the notion that others’ benefit is axiomatic to any action we take in the world.

In a beautiful piece about “Positive Sum Worlds” Toby, Laura and Sam name privacy, freely shared work, liberalism, accountability, and democratic participation as valuable beyond the reductive economic concept of good. If we are able to understand not just the deep game theory that Virgil described above, but begin to think together - in dialogue - about the language of the games we play, then this could redefine economic ‘problems’ like free-riders into wider and more human publics whom we ought to be serving.

Economists might struggle with this shift in meaning, but it is precisely this kind of linguistic reordering which lies at the heart of the new language Karl describes above. Simon, too, has written about how Ethereum implements currency as language, which is an idea common to a few weirdos way down this particular rabbit hole.

These kind of meaningful alterations to the language with which we communicate indicate another critical piece of the otherinter.net essay, which is that “A public always exceeds one's known protocol.” In Module 7, we will come to understand how the protocol does not encourage giving, the protocol is the gift. When seen as such, we can also see how

Some ideas about what coordinated capital could be intended to do have been offered already, but the larger point here is that it is up to you to define your own piece in this shared network, and to realise that such personally meaningful work is done best in relationship. As Toby, Laura and Sam write,

One of the core insights in Positive Sum World thinking has to do with what we will call time horizons. Carl Sagan reminds us, “Books are proof that humanity is capable of magic” because they allow us to time travel, literally. Whose voice is ringing in your head when you read words written hundreds of years ago? The author, your own, some mix of the two?

Each new medium we invent allows us to cast consciousness further and further along the unknown dimension of “future” time. It is an idea many indigenous people are familiar with: think not of yourself, but of seven generations from now and live with those yet to come, those “faces beneath the earth”, continuously in remembrance. Blockchains allows us to ask realistically, what about seventy generations from now? Or seven hundred?

Toby, Laura and Sam ask:

This is what any medium asks us, deep down: what do you remember of all those you have been, and how do you want to be remembered by whom you will yet come to be? Blockchains simply add more precision, clarity, and urgency to this question by making that old Jose Saramago idea ever more obvious.

We’ll finish, as always, at exactly the same place we started all this: