Οἰκονομικά
Utility is Liberty > Time is money.
Socioeconomic contracts are immensely important to humans and non-humans alike. Comprised of codes of conduct between dynamic groups, they have been formed and enforced throughout every cultural experiment undergone in the modern era — many preceding modernity, and many postdating the current era with effects yet to be realized.
Contracts often survive through chaos and collapse, especially in globalist dominated eras, as they tend to define the transition of goods and services through space and time — regardless of actual ownership claims.
The transfer of these claims have been recorded in many unique ways throughout history and will continue to explore the path of least resistance in technologically dominated progressive systems.
The exact contractarian definitions of such interactions are normally and originally unjustified in order to bypass the artificial mechanisms that such predispositions can be used to project power in distributed systems artificially.
In fact, most of the naturalized definitions necessary to interoperate with existing governance systems must be undertaken only after a baseline of consensus has been established to justify why agreement on contract semantics should be sought between unilaterally diverse groups.
This baseline can be expressed as two points joined together — but it cannot stay linear forever, as more points are added and connected a very natural phenomenon can be observed:
Certain projects — the XRP Ledger becoming the prominent example explored here — so far, have established that baseline consensus must be met before such socioeconomic contracts can even begin to interoperate.
This is normally undertaken through semantic ontological alignment and justified through the the allotment of asset-based resources into clusters of accessible markets observable by independent agents whom use the same language to communicate across jurisdictions.
One may propose that a past social contract must be rewritten in the present, but only realized in the near-future, to establish consensus around the value of utility-liberty as a traditionally human centrist system projects itself into a clearly transhuman system currently under construction.
John Rawls’ theory of justice is the most widely-cited example of a contractarian theory, but before outlining it, two words of caution are necessary. First, the shape of the theory has evolved from its first incarnation in Rawls (1958) through his major work A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) and on to Rawls (1993) and Rawls (2001). Second, although Rawls has consistently claimed that the principles of justice he defends are the principles that would be selected by people in a suitably designed ‘original position’ in which they are asked to choose the social and political institutions they will live under — this is what qualifies his theory as contractarian — it is less clear how important a role the contract itself plays in his thinking on Justice.
Assume we as agents are in a new original position within a framework of consensus based governance that supersedes sovereign state social contracts, not by throwing them out, but by holding them to the standard of present and near-future compliance and regulatory systems as they are developed around us all.
Essentially, how might value be generated and shared via a diverse group of agents — or actors — in a system that must manage its interactions with all other diverse cohorts representing systems comprised of equally unique agents?
This is a challenge that many have actively undergone through the ages, and the postmodern results of which will be shared with current observers soon.
As value moves across networks it tends to become abstracted by the normative logic applied in each unique jurisdiction it services.
This creates complexity as each socioeconomic system tends to define objects in the form of data distinctly — which it uses to enforce domestic and international policy dynamically with fiat currencies as intersubjective arbiters.
The Internet is not one thing, rather it is a general arrangement and combination of many techniques, logical methods, ways of working, social relationships and physical systems, all of which are adapted to function with one another to support data packaging and relay patterns serving everyone’s mutual interests.
While some standardization exists, there are incentives to ensure that optimized flow of logic applies first domestically and only after, internationally.
This creates disparity in most globalized economic spheres which tend to be further abstracted by domestic financial institutions when issuing their own currencies to act as an fiscal standardization of law or regulation within their domestic sphere of influence. This observable centralization over time is best illustrated by the sterilization of state banks in the United States since the early 19th century.
Normally, humans seek economic advantage and will always move to an area of least resistance towards that end — if they are allowed.
Without that movement restriction, thermodynamic theory can be applied to human capital theory when abstractions are revealed and naturally dissolved.
One of the more powerful abstractions conjured by the State is the reliance on authority to propose and maintain new rails, or pathways, towards safe agreement within modern social network systems — conflict creates friction and friction creates costs.
Assuming economic advantage naturally centralizes authority through the reliance on stable issuance of agreement, the dividends paid by this production to the public through the commonwealth have also been abstracted by the state.
…The rise in capital’s share of national income gains, combined with the inflation rates of the 1970s and early 1980s, induced further deregulation of financial institutions as well. Inflation rendered the real rate of interest on thrift and then bank deposits negative, leading growing numbers of depositors to place their savings in mutual funds, which were permitted to make riskier investments than depository institutions and offer correspondingly higher returns on “deposits,” instead... — R. Hockett
But as public interest becomes organically safe through concepts such as consensus, state sovereign production advantage is lost, and decentralized risk is rewarded at a higher rate — but abstracted from the public simultaneously by the same state in the diminishing value of liberty.
The sovereign state must increase the level of direct influence over the individual to maintain the status quo of authority, polarizing the value of labor between producer and consumer economies artificially as a means to this end.
This is only a small example of how actual value can be abstracted when authority starts competing against apolitical systems such as the private individual.
The population that expects value to continue to grow through the state becomes reliant on it — and thus the dividends withheld by the state further expedite authority centralization as a means of sovereign debt creation to realize the difference at a future point in time.
In this way, one might see how semantics and their ontology are important not only in the bias they can create, but in the bias they can dissolve through communal understanding based in code as law.
Left to its own devices, authority is centralized by the same theory that individuals utilize to seek opportunity continuously:
Advantage is sought, regulated to protect sovereign interests, and then deregulated as new advantage is sought and captured.
Normative logic will need to be functionally integrated into computational logic in a manner that is consistently operable across any type of data collection, any use case application and any network transmission component. Rule-makers and rule-takers of all types across diverse jurisdictions, cultures, and schools of thought require a simple, general purpose computational method to give effect to their respective prerogatives and preferences.
Normalization of such differences can occur through economics in the form of fiat correspondence, or currency messaging between entities using an asset as a common language.
In the current globalized world, that language is spoken in United States Dollars and Chinese Renminbi with a few select intermediaries.
However, tracking value through currency as correspondence has proven difficult when the agents they service realize the inherent differences in monetary policy between sovereigns.
A new solution is to treat currency as data — and translate the value through bits.
These ideas are not new, but are some of the most debated concepts in globalization. I would refer to the concept of ‘oughtomation’ as coined by the Xalgorithms team:
Rules arise in each society from shared resolve, contractual requirement and statutory authority. But each person who is subject to a rule retains discretion about whether or not, and to what degree, to act in accordance with it.
We propose the term ‘oughtomation’ to refer to any general-purpose request-response method that, following an event or a status change, gives effect to MUST, MAY and SHOULD assertions of individuals and organizations that are ‘in effect’ and ‘applicable’. From any node on a network, anyone may publish, discover, fetch, test and triage normative rules which are in effect for given dates/times, identities and jurisdictions, and are applicable when certain facts exhibit.
Compare this to the optimized consensus protocol enabled by Cobalt, a consensus solution that has been waiting in the wings for distributed governance to be cleared by state sovereign regulators who have reacted slowly to innovations in network based value exchanges.
For XRP, the concern is thus less about how to improve the efficiency of the protocol, and more about how to enable easy “decentralization”. Traditional consensus algorithms assume a complete network where all nodes agree on who is participating in consensus. However, in a real scenario where a consensus network is run by actually independent parties with their own beliefs, regulations, and motivations, it would be effectively impossible to guarantee that everyone agrees on the same network participants. Further, trying to make such a system amenable to open participation would immediately open the door to a Sybil attack wherein a single entity gains control of a substantial fraction of the network and wreaks havoc. Thus these classical consensus algorithms are a poor choice for use in a decentralized network. The XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol (XRP LCP) resolves this issue by allowing partial disagreement on the participants in the network while still guaranteeing that all nodes come to agreement on the ledger state. The set of participants that a node considers in the network is referred to as that node’s unique node list or UNL…
The value of agreement utility can occur bidirectionally, and the dividends realized in near-real-time, only if the momentum of coming to agreement does not decrease the value of the agents — or users — nor their ability to compound such agreements into complex governance contracts in order to reach consensus around the positions of priority related to their agreement mechanisms which ought not to be abstracted into a centralized system.
While certain Proof of Work (PoW) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) systems may utilize competition to provide incentives to come to agreement faster by increasing the networks access to computation to confirm or reject state changes to a ledger tracking their data correspondence, these same systems also run into a gambit of exposure externalities that are hard to accurately project within a cost-benefit framework to non-network agents reliant on said validations.
Thus, an old abstraction is recreated and wrapped in a new system — not very optimal.
However, these barriers are being challenged through innovation led by decentralized authorities in their respective correspondent systems. Authority based on ontologically consensused distributed systems instead of soft power projection through currencies managed by state sovereigns.
So here comes the challenge: how do we aggregate together people’s preferences? Some private and public goods are worth producing, others are not. In the case of private goods, the question is easy, because we can just decompose it into a series of decisions for each individual. Whatever amount each person is willing to pay for, that much gets produced for them; the economics is not especially complex. In the case of public goods, however, you cannot “decompose”, and so we need to add up people’s preferences in a different way. Quadratic Payments: A Primer
We as liberty seeking utilitarians must all continue to experiment with such lofty ambitions such as ‘coming to consensus’ around the lowest form of governance that allows for the realization of value generated from a groups’ production to maintain advantageous positioning in the interoperability with other apolitical systems.
A proposal to sustain this notion may be pursued by organic subsidization of peer node operations as a utility function of the liberty of its members, and in drawing from their produced assets a source of value that could be held in common trust.
Future experiments will be initialized under a framework that pulls from the above references and is based around the normative logic championed by Robert Nozick:
The framework is — or, more precisely, sustains — a discovery procedure. Under the protective umbrella of the framework, individuals are presented with and can try out diverse communities while communities themselves arise and modify themselves in their competitive search to sustain, improve, or increase their membership. A wide range of communities will continually arise out of and in response to the evolving perceptions that diverse individuals will have about what modes of sociality will best suit them and will best attract welcome partners. Communities will survive and perhaps expand or be imitated insofar as they actually embody modes of relationship that serve well their actual or prospective membership or insofar as they successfully refine their offerings in the market place of communities. The framework also insures that those who are already confident that they know what sort of community is best for them will be free to form those communities by voluntary subscription and, thereby, to manifest their actual value (or disvalue) to themselves and to other seekers of well-being — Robert Nozick’s Political Philosophy.
Such exploration requires energy like all phase shifts do. To provide such energy should be considered a source of production, the value of which should act as a return to those who necessitate such exchange between traditionally static systems.
Progress must meet culture through the projection of culture into progress vis a vis liberty-utility. Thus, the value must remain in the control of the individual who seeks advantage in globalized systems continuously — not abstracted by the leviathan who seeks to realize that value without consent from the commonwealth.
