🤯 Meaning¶

Any meaning we can make is dynamic, not static. It is deeply contextual. It is bound to time and place and person. It is highly particular. Yet, a truly honest and courageous description of the personal can create an environment conducive to encountering some aspect of yourself in the work of another. In that singular moment of encounter, shared meaning can exist without belonging to you, or me, or the work which causes/effects it.

This inability to own or control is critical, because much like any language, no one person can say what Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other network means. This is very much a feature rather than a bug. That said, many people have pointed out that, because they are programmable, we can use Bitcoin or Ethereum to change what we mean by “money”. We can use Ethereum to change what we mean by “contract”. These are profound shifts. Though what exactly they’re shifting us toward is difficult to say, precisely because no one person can say it. The real shift arises over time due to communal use, practice, and interaction.

Smooth Response¶

This is one of the core reasons Kernel will always resist definitive answers. Yet, we do like planting seeds. Here is the small kernel we’d like to offer in this big conversation:

One assumption this seed statement makes is that we are currently stuck. It is a phrase taken from David Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything. Stuckness is our generation’s struggle: not some namable and countable enemy, not some particular evil we can all point to and agree on. We are stuck in old arrangements of power and authority, and spend all our energy debating who should rule us rather than how to rule ourselves and what that kind of leadership would actually look like. Too many of us have forgotten our capacity to imagine and enact different ways of living together, because the responsibility required to wield meaningful agency feels overwhelming.

Being stuck looks like loneliness and competition in online spaces that race to the bottom of the brainstem with extractive incentives and manipulative algorithms. Being stuck looks like democracy which is practiced via the election of a single candidate from a few impoverished choices every four or so years. Being stuck looks like a few winning and everyone else losing in the games our society deems valuable. In fact, it looks like there being winners or losers at all, rather than the sort of incentives which help us keep the game of life being played, infinitely.

We would like to suggest that becoming less stuck is a worthwhile goal we can adopt in the pursuit of understanding all the many meanings we’d like to make as a diverse community of practice who value plurality and are not willing to settle on one, conclusive meaning.

What Does Money Mean?¶

What does it mean to program money meaningfully? Well, what does it mean to use language meaningfully? One way of looking at it is that words only mean anything because the community who uses them agrees that they do. So, meaningful language is both that which is readily understood and that which, in anticipating its own most likely interpretations and adapting its structure accordingly, reveals something novel or surprising in its otherwise ordinary operation.

Until 2009, money was not quite the same. A small group of largely unelected bureaucrats in combination with powerful financial executives and a select group of politicians got to define monetary policy and the way it plays out in the larger economy. Whether they do a good or bad job continues to be the subject of heated debate.

What structural shifts need to happen in order for more people to contribute to what money means by virtue of how it is created, distributed, and used in the world gets less attention. Small wonder then that the meanings most people associate with money have to do with exclusivity, corruption, competition, scarcity, and the need to accumulate in order to be safe.

Programming money meaningfully might mean producing code that is responsible for creating and distributing value in ways people can understand and which - in anticipating what people think money already is - surprises people with more prosocial effects, such that more people can be involved and more meanings can be made in an ongoing and dynamic process. It also means telling stories about our code which invite different kinds of people and perspectives into its use and cultivate different kinds of social contracts. And it means participating with others in communities of practice committed to investigating what money could be made to mean if we were less stuck in our relationship to power.

Meaningful money is a multidimensional affair because it involves people, planet, narrative, and code. A shared global ledger run on distributed networks where our languages function in deterministic ways is the only medium currently available where we could create such meanings.

Revealing Power¶

So, do blockchains only have to do with money? Obviously not, because programming money meaningfully is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end, where the end might be distributing power. Our seed suggestion implies that understanding what blockchains could mean entails understanding how power operates in the world and how that can realistically be reprogrammed.

How can we be intentional about who and what we empower with our code, our stories, and the ways in which we direct each other’s attention?

To be clear, the crypto community has not done a wonderful job of this so far. The wealth distribution in our networks is often worse than in the most unequal countries on Earth. The way we create and distribute money is often woefully uncreative, if not downright manipulative. We often repeat and advance the most extractive patterns others of us might wish to evolve from.

To understand how this has happened, we can ask, “What is power?” Whether it is political, financial, social or otherwise, the simplest way to understand power is by considering its physical meaning. Power is defined by the amount of energy transferred in a given time: the less time it takes to transfer the same amount of energy, the greater is your power. If you can use the path of least resistance, you can transfer a lot of energy in a very short time. Therefore, the powerful are those with access to the channels that transfer significant energy without incurring high time costs.

For instance, the Chair of the Federal Reserve can change US interest rates in a few weeks of meetings. You and I could try for a lifetime and still fail. We lack access to low resistance channels and so the time cost becomes exorbitant.

This is why blockchains are a viable medium for distributing power. They hold the promise of opening many more channels to transfer significant energy with less resistance, which means a much greater chance of the kind of ongoing encounters with particular meaning courageously encoded that can illustrate genuinely shared truths. There are a few people doing this already. We need more. Indeed, our ability to find solutions which genuinely enable people to make new meanings with money–which is equivalent to our ability to distribute power–will define the quality and scope of other applications we can build and the impact they will have.

For instance, one cannot build meaningfully different social media if the underlying economic incentives are still extractive or competitive.

Play Without End¶

In fact, we might come to recognise that money is the most powerful social medium there is. It is the ultimate “social layer”. In seeing this with clear eyes, it is perhaps possible to begin to play with power and the way we structure it sociopolitically.

Once you see that this is what you’re doing when you’re writing a smart contract–that is, reprogramming power by virtue of how value flows through the functions your language executes–you might be less inclined to add

onlyOwner

modifiers or repeat the same old structural relationships to authority and permission we all submit to, often unconsciously.

It’s important that this is approached with a sense of deep playfulness. Play is not meant here as something trivial: yet another memecoin which has no deeper meaning, no surprise in its prosocial effects, no durable community of practice to make the transferred energy significantly enrich the quality of time its members can share.

Play is the spontaneous and joyful exploration of genuine alternatives which, in being aware of what is expected, happily inverts that to illustrate how conventional and conditioned our lives often are. It's not about pure speculation, or burning down the system, or using new tools to perpetuate the same traumas we have suffered because we can now exclude others from the games we make just like we were ourselves once excluded. Play, in being aware of expectations and nevertheless altering them, is about finding new and surprising balances in how we agree to arrange our lives together.

Perhaps such balances may be found somewhere between play and virtue? If we want to encode the value of being unstuck into more meaningful monies, we will require both. We need play to become unstuck in a context of inflexible and outdated virtue. And we need virtue to become unstuck in a context of irresponsible play. This could look like crafting flexible systems, sensible to context and open to change despite (or, if you're really playful, because of) the “permanent” medium in which they exist.

Here is one more
powerless protocol,
playfully designed to ask:

will you accept the poverty required
to redefine wealth, to program money
in meaningful ways which move
with the times and do not resist,
but open into channels where real value flows
by virtue of the architecture
participation promises?

No force here,
just an invitation
to use the short time you have
in service of true power.

It took a long time for the systems of money and the associated arrangements of power we live within to form. The work we are involved in here is generational, and deep meanings like these change slowly. This is not to deny the urgency with which we are called to enact change, it is simply to acknowledge that “the times are urgent; we must slow down”. This slowing down is not simply a decrease in velocity while still moving towards greater efficiency, productivity, and prosperity. It is a move in the minor key, a soft-shoe shuffle sidestep down a different direction given that we have reached the crossroads and must now look for radically new ways to live well together.

As we say elsewhere in Kernel, it is only when you are having the time of your life that you can invite others to join the game, and then you might really begin to live into the infinite meanings of this one, wild and precious life.

Further References¶