It was nice to have someone to talk to about the kinds of things that I spend a lot of time thinking about, but still, every time I meet someone who is sympathetic to conversation on topics that I haven't put to words before, I end up so disappointed in the way they come out. It's just yet another paradox that plagues human life in general: you can't get a job because you don't have any experience, but you don't have any experience because you can't get a job; I struggle to articulate my thoughts in speech because I lack a community within which I can essay my thoughts, but I lack a community within which I can essay my thoughts because I struggle to articulate them.

With writing on the other hand, it's always this sick bipolar sense that I'm either so far above the fray, or so far below it, especially when it comes to online discussion, and it's hard not to see how disillusioned we all are when it comes to online discourse, yet we can't stop engaging with it in some way because it has become a part of life, and so I've held back from trying to write too much on the internet. If the internet ever represented a renewal in the hope for freedom in our lives, then paradoxically it now represents a massive constraint on what constitutes valid or authentic self-expression. The contradiction is heightened even further for me because I see in Bitcoin, freedom money by and for the internet, the key to unlock some of the paradoxes at the heart of human life concerning time, work, money, power, truth, and freedom, and yet I feel totally removed from the conversation because it all happens through social media, which as I said I can't wrap my head around. I don't find any authenticity in the community, not because it isn't there, but because I lack the context of authenticity in my own life, and of course the medium itself is inherently inauthentic which makes finding authenticity that much harder. And so I feel that if I can establish a context for authentic engagement with the community by writing something that articulates my thoughts better than I ever could in person, I can kind of bypass some of the intractable paradoxes that have been holding me back personally, and maybe shed some insight on the bigger picture.

I've been using the term 'authenticity' which might seem like the kind of vague, wishy washy thing that people just throw around for rhetorical purposes to make them sound like they give a shit or something, but the concept acts as the underlying basis for the patterns of commonality that I've traced through everything that I've been reading recently and everything that I want to connect with in my writing. Actually it's funny that the last book I read way back in early 2019, during the time I started working six days a week, naively thinking that I was getting ahead in life even though I was completely starved of intellectual stimulation or curiosity, and before the pandemic turned the world on its head and I was begrudgingly forced to come out of my little anti-thought cocoon, was Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game, which dealt precisely with the subject of how authenticity and accountability could act as forces for social justice in the face of the crises unveiled by the 2009 GFC. Ripped straight from Wikipedia, his point in the book was "that skin in the game—i.e., having a shared risk when taking a major decision—is necessary for fairness, commercial efficiency, and risk management, as well as being necessary to understand the world." He built his name on popularising terms that he coined around that time and created a whole little cottage industry for himself writing books like Black Swan and Antifragile, and going on cable news shows to discuss economics and politics, and while his ideas and concepts are valid and remain useful, he himself has turned out to be a cautionary tale for how hypocrisy and lack of accountability undermine discussions on how to fix our broken institutions, or act with authenticity in a corrupt system. Reading his work it's clear, if he's not a full-blown egomaniac, he seems to think quite highly of himself and he has a lot of contempt for institutions and the people he sees as blindly propping them up, and there's nothing at all wrong with this if he was just using it as a means to further the project of somehow contributing to the improvement of humanity, except it has become increasingly clear that he didn't believe a whit of what he said in terms of living a life that followed the precepts that he preached, and that all the attention that his ideas garnered simply contributed to the further inflation of his ego. Sadly this pattern is one that we see endlessly repeating itself -- Musk, Trump, Kanye are all prominent examples, but as I said, the pattern is endless -- where ambitious people use the media to disseminate a self-promotional message that ostensibly has a concern for the improvement of humanity at its heart, despite the fact that it's just pushing a product, and everyone overlooks the egomania and the hypocrisy because they love the product and how it makes them feel, all while they continue funneling the money that represents their adulation into the pockets of such individuals who in turn become more corrupt, powerful, and disconnected from whatever authentic connection to humanity that they had, or thought they had. This loss of connection to the rest of humanity by powerful individuals is not new, but is just increasingly visible these days, especially through social media. The phenomenon falls under the philosophical concept of subjectivity and I hope that by analysing and framing modern subjectivity accurately and succinctly, and then discussing the feasibility of alternate forms of subjectivity such as my idea of "peer to peer subjectivity", I can start to build a kind of authentic connection to the world for myself and others.

The idea is based on the structure of network connectivity, where users on the network govern each other's behaviour based on their adherence to a protocol. It's inspired, of course, by Bitcoin, and while it's far from being fleshed out, and obviously will need to differ from actual computer network protocols, as human subjectivity isn't something that can be forced to conform to the relatively simple protocols that they run on, it's an idea that I've been slowly figuring out in my head in little fits and spurts, and I won't know what it's really worth until I put the work in, get it down on the page, and see what kind of feedback it gets. The key point is to outline a system that prioritises maintaining the authenticity of a message by preventing a subject from manipulating the system in its favour in order to leech value out of the system and grow its influence, giving all of its peers a system of checks and balances to keep it honest, and making sure that there's something tangible at stake in order to distribute risk across the network. Bitcoin has set an important example here in the way that it ties energy to value because that's how it makes the value tangible: it's worth the price of energy, simple as, no manipulation possible. Under the current system of government issued currencies, only the power of coercion makes value tangible, American power outstripping the rest of the globe and therefore being the most valuable, and so all manner of manipulation is possible, including all manner of deception, fraud, and criminality. I believe that this lack of accountability for deception and manipulation, and the lack of tangibility in value generation are at the heart of many of the existential crises that humanity seems unable to even begin to tackle because of conflicting political interests.

So far in my writing I've been trying to outline how we arrived here, what kind of historical events directly contributed to what a lot of people online refer to as "the worst timeline", and I've been focusing a lot on the early 20th century, specifically what is commonly called the modern and pre-modern eras, the inflection point where the scientific developments spurred on by a European arms race culminated in the mass liquidation of European empires, and the consolidation of western imperialism under the aegis of the American empire. I'm less concerned with establishing a timeline of events but rather with establishing the effects of history on subjectivity and the intellectual movements that inform it. Basically, it boils down to something very much like what we're dealing with now: a sense of alienation in a world where technology has developed faster than institutions can attempt to balance out their deleterious effects, to the benefit of unaccountable autocratic forces, and that those effects have been asymmetrically offset onto the powerless. The difference from today is that in the 20th century, scientific developments in energy unlocked the greatest material surpluses in productivity that humanity has ever known, many powerful interests that had been able to manipulate the distribution of material surpluses in the past had been deprived of their influence by the destruction of capital during the two great wars, and that consequently of both of these facts, living conditions had improved so enormously that there was an enormous amount of faith that the world was developing in a positive and just manner, unlike today. The past echoes in the present and it has much to teach us, but we still have to ask the question of exactly where the project of "modernity" went wrong. Many have proposed that it had to do with Nixon taking America off the gold standard in 1971, the establishment of the Petro-dollar to guarantee America's energy reserves while entrenching the corrupt power of the planet-destroying oil industry, or even Kissinger's gamble to undermine the Soviets by opening up diplomatic and trade relations with China, thereby massively empowering the CCP, which has turned out to be the largest threat to human existence in the 21st century, except maybe the excesses of American imperialism fueled by the oil industry. All of those are very compelling factors, and the best way that I've found to holistically understand them as a historical moment came from Mark Fisher, the British leftist writer I told you about briefly when we were on the subway last week, and his framing of the failure of modernity as "post-Fordism". I don't really have time to get into all the implications of why he chose "Fordism" as the term to best characterise the early modern period, as this has taken me all day to write and certainly must be becoming onerous to read if you even have read this far, but it suffices to say that it really made a lot of sense to me in explaining the shift in feeling between the modern and postmodern periods, beyond what I had understood those terms to mean from studying literature, art, and history. The crux of his argument was that there was a fundamental shift in the economy during this period --Fisher actually nails it down to the precise moment in 1979 when Jacob Volcker raised the interest rate by 22% in a day, he says, thereby instituting supply-side economics-- from a duty/class-based system, to a control based system, and the implications of this are all the dysfunction and uncertainty that plagues discourse surrounding politics and the economy, around the world today. Ford is a particularly apt figure to define that period as his famous goal of having a Ford in every driveway is almost synonymous with the "American Dream", and the loss of which is synonymous with pessimism at the state of the decaying world order. He represents a kind of capitalist who, while not benign or desirable by any means, at least recognised that mass demand needed to be facilitated in order for faith in the economy to propel growth. I also like the use of his name to represent this period because of a little episode that mostly only Bitcoiners will know about, where Ford proposed to use an old NY power plant to implement a new kind of energy-backed currency, that would deprive the world's government of the incentive to control money, and thus end war. Obviously he never followed through with this, and war only became increasingly incentivised once the gold standard was abolished, but it remains an interesting thought to keep coming back to: could an energy-backed currency help establish a sustainable and peaceful world order that leads humanity toward a new era of hope and prosperity? No, I don't believe that it could ever happen, but that doesn't mean I don't want to explore how it could happen, what it could look like, and in the meantime what living the kind of authentic life, based on the ethical premises of such a currency, looks like.