Reconsidering Trustless Governance

The dialogue between centralization and decentralization stems back to ancient times in the form of lengthy Platonic dialogues on what is the ideal government, presenting itself front-and-center in historical conflicts such as Caesar’s rise to power marking Rome’s transition from republic to empire. In the post French Revolution world consensus has converged towards a republican form of governance, however, in modern times the conversation has drifted away from thwarting corruption in human institutions to digitizing a legal codex onto a blockchain ledger giving rise to digital mechanistic governance stripping away the human entirely out of the loop.

Birth out of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis was the paradigm of decentralized governance, a public blockchain ledger trustlessly distributing state across a delocalized network of validators that functionally abstracts away human administrative override to an immutable set of preprogrammed policies.

Unlike human institutions, blockchain(s) ensure neutrality by removing the intrinsic bias of human decision making thus intending to usurp the perennial cycle of institutional rot and revolution that’s been seminal to the human story. Whilst blockchain governance promises incorruptible transparency, it also insinuates post-human governance as an imperative thus paving the way for an AI-first governance model. Coincidentally, the blockchain substrate provides both a telos and operational framework for non-sentient AI systems fundamentally unable to independently define purpose from the open-ended nature of reality.

As scintillating as the error-correcting digital singularity might be to the technologically-inclined, biological life has proven maximally resilient in overcoming entropy, thus we ought reconsider the tendency for civilizations to undergo “hard forks” as a feature exemplifying resilience rather than a bug to be squashed for eternity.

Blockchain Governance at Large

Political discourse of prior millennia honed in on the question of how to delegate power across a populace without invoking either tyranny or mob rule thus resulting in the creation of systems for both selecting and training leaders most evident in the perennial example of Plato’s Republic.

Blockchain governance flips this traditional wisdom on its head, using “decentralization” as a means of delegating the system state across multiple actors by functionally centralizing process and achieving intergenerational permanence between replicate system state nodes. Blockchain governance operates on the premise that there exists a mechanistic immutable process which can be instantiated at a singular point in time and continually remain solvent into perpetuity.

The immutability of process implied within blockchain systems insinuates the judgment of human discretion can only be used for malice and that institutional process is to reign supreme above all else. The logical conclusion of a blockchain system is to coordinate all actions onto a bounded closed system which is directly contradictory to the entropic open-ended world we find ourselves in. In some respects this can begin to resemble totalitarianism where the institutional process becomes of the utmost imperative ranking above even human flourishing. The problem has never been that humans break rules, the problem lies with which rules they break and if the situation demands for them to break said rules. It is exactly this judgment that has given mankind the wherewithal to organize revolutions and topple regimes to set everything ablaze and start anew without reprise.

Even if a blockchain system could imitate this judgment meaning it would introspectively permute upon itself recursively, some parts of that system would have to stay unchanged if it is to remain in continuity with the origin instantiation of the blockchain itself. For a blockchain system to fulfill its function of immutability, it cannot imitate the endless churn of carte blanche resets endemic to human institutions, thus a blockchain system could never and will never possess the same dynamism as biology. Human knowledge is always one genius away from resetting its prior corpus and starting anew as once upon a time we practiced physics without Einstein the same way we practiced medicine without Mendel.

Human reproduction is an already pre-existing forking system that resets the held priors of the preceding generation, mapping itself perfectly onto the dynamics of institutional hard-forks. Thus we must ask this question, it is exactly the means to corrupt, usurp but also choose that has enabled us to survive so why then attempt thwart this system. Why try superseding human biology when it’s demonstrated its ability to be resilient to entropy with an immutable machine singularity that could end up being entirely insolvent when we already have a self-permuting system that’s functional and in-place.

Institutions and Trust

As much as blockchain lauds itself as a trustless system attempting to mechanistically outmaneuver the precondition of trust, trust continues to be a fundamental unit in human dynamics as one of the primary intermediaries enabling humans to thrive. Trust mirrors both the will in its indeterminacy and the chaos of an unpredictable entropic world thus creating a baseline measurement for inferring the internal entropy of an individual.

Thus it was for this reason institutions were created as a redundancy layer to the intrinsic fallibility and unreliability of individuals. Because trust is hard-earned and instrumental for human coordination, the arbitrariness communicated to outsiders of the institution’s in-group becomes imperative for creating a pipeline for converting the out-group into an indistinguishable in-group. While the rite-of-passage heuristic is a frustrating experience for the out-group, there’s no other sensible way for human communion to manifest as authentic communion cannot function as a set of contractual obligations.

This same communion and its arbitrary processes is an indispensable feature to the human experience, however in a world where trustless governance is taken to its logical conclusion, the arbitrariness of human communion would have to be excised as all interactions would have to be contingent on a set of predetermined contractual obligations to commence said interaction. In this theoretical world all outputted language would be etched onto a blockchain, autonomically creating contractual conditions out of even the most trivial of language thus mechanistically removing the possibility of trust as an intermediary of exchange. There has yet to be an objective means for identify a rational meaning for life, and it is this same trust that mirrors the indeterminacy of the meaning of life itself.

Humans are profoundly imperfect creatures but robbing the human experience of its non-transactional intuition-based communal formation, living, and governance would lead to something far more draconian as it the same space of ambiguity and arbitrariness that enables trust and authentic connection. Ultimately it is not logic that governs being and the human experience, but rather it is the subconscious and how it guides feeling through intuition manifest as qualia.

Beyond centralization and decentralization

Decentralization and consequently blockchain are predicated on the maximization of individual liberty, however the emphasis is on freedom in a technical sense not a functional one.

Within Christian theology, freedom gets described in functional terms where man is a contributing member to society not enslaved by vice when operating in the purview of prescribed Christian doctrine. The important distinction here is that freedom to do what you want is unified in conjunction by that what should be done rather than on focusing solely on what can be done.

However the true sentiment of decentralization is a protest of centralization, a phenomenon when an actor(s) acquires de facto autonomy over the plurality of system output(s) where the continuity of said actor(s) in the system is determined by legacy rather than competency. This situation is how we find the internet today and why blockchain systems like Urbit have been created in attempt to thwart de facto ownership of the internet.

The key caveat here is that maximizing freedom in a technical sense does not maximize freedom in a functional sense as the internet today has foregone any content ownership protocols standardizing only communication protocols.

When you combine the capture of an open-ended system like a social media platform with an absence of any content ownership standards where content can arbitrarily be removed without recourse, a collective sense of entrapment is felt by the users, especially the users invested with their livelihood into said platform.

Here lies the contradiction, the internet of today does have more “technical” freedom but that’s come at the loss of functional freedom from the few actor(s) that have achieved market capitulation. Choosing to rally around freedom without a prescriptive human moral claim makes it much harder to defend any thesis involving “freedom”, be it functional, technical, or otherwise. A blockchain internet contingent on how it’s executed could create a world with more functional freedom, but prescriptive claims of “why” that should be done are sorely lacking. The in-group dynamics of human communion historically speaking has fulfilled the “why” said freedom should be acquired, wrapping itself around ethnic, cultural, tribal, and or religious primitives.

Beyond trying to create a perfectly immutable blockchain governance model functioning as a singularity to last all of time, rather, we should be asking ourselves what we want to build and borrow between arbitrary human systems when we need dynamism and decentralized blockchain systems when we need relative permanence. Sometimes we need short-term authoritarian rule in periods of crisis and emergency, for to involve everyone would only make the situation worse in the same way how not all economic consumption yields a net positive if it comes with the accumulation of collective biological debt inhibiting said populace from procreating the next generation. It might be that trying to prevent this “wrong” of a winner-take-all market penetration could end up creating a situation where competency becomes downregulated in the vein of preserving the common good which might be one of the most dangerous of precedents to set, if not nearly identical to the thesis of communism. The natural process of forking works both around and through governmental and economic market capitulation without creating arbitrary restraints on immediate outcomes even if it may come at the expense of some intergenerational turmoil.

Conclusions

There’s no free lunch to be had with a blockchain model of governance as part of what makes human institutions so powerful is that just as quickly as rules can be implemented, they can just as quickly be overwritten. We’ll probably never be able to stop nepotism and all the endemic network effects acquired by a ruling class with carte blanche authority, but the evil of pre-optimization might be a worse alternative as eventually the hubris from the spoils of excess brings down even the mightiest of empires on a long enough time horizon¹.

The enthusiasm of blockchain advocates seems to be more indicative of their inability to play realpolitik than it is about the veracity of the claims regarding the market conditions. For some, they project their insecurity on failing to identify the dynamics of the human condition onto their desire to surrogate humans with machines because unlike humans they know machines can be fully understood. The foregone conclusion to combat institutional malfeasance by removing the possibility of human decision making demonstrates their disinterest in reconciling with the human condition and their implicit bias towards a post-human future.

However, the simpler explanation for blockchain enthusiasm is either wanting to ride the early-adopter network effects of a brand-new system or using crypto as a vehicle for hard forking away from the current system. Regardless of the system and who or what might be governing it, the in-group and early adopters will fight tooth and nail to maintain their positions enabling them to rest on the laurels of their legacy rather than merit formed in the present.

In an entropic world, the uncertainty intrinsic to trust is how mankind has best hedged against entropy, thus the non-deterministic nature of trust is equal parts necessary to forging authentic bonds of human communion. By embracing the uncertainty intrinsic to our nature within ourselves rather than obfuscating the decision-making to some mechanistic process, we give ourselves the best chance at tackling the uncertainty of the natural physical world. The time to generate is now.

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Click here for more reading on what a culture would like if it was encapsulated by an ethos to conquer itself before an enemy from afar to thus continue onwards for eternity. ↩