The evolution, without the bottleneck.

The 15th century tale of the Everyman, who discovers the only thing he can take with him at the end of his life, to stand with him at judgement, is his good deeds. He finds knowledge will accompany him up to his death, but it is only his good deeds by which he is judged.

It is the emergence of the Everyman that, I propose, or maybe just fantasize, will reinvigorate and renew the crumbling society in which we find ourselves.

Who is the Everyman?

The Everyman is the self-sufficient individual who has developed a broad understanding, experience, and skill, across multiple fields. The Everyman can communicate patterns across fields to those deeper entrenched within the field. It is the Everyman who brings a cross pollination of ideas to the various modes of thinking that have become increasingly sequestered due to the pressures of market, money and institution.

The Everyman, through his self-sufficiency, is not beholden to others for subsistence, and thus, has a resilience, autonomy and sovereignty without the need for accumulated wealth, though the Everyman will not shy from labor, but rather will act with sovereignty in selecting those he sees fit to oblige himself to.

Any man or woman can become the Everyman, and the Everyman assists others to become the Everyman unto themselves.

With their time largely freed up, there will emerge a network of Everymen, who will have the necessary time for education, experimentation, and creation. The Everyman may be creative, experimental and educational in any field, and will likely sate their interests in multiple fields.

The capacity to self-educate and collaborate with increasing freedom will enable the rapid evolution of the Everyman, and the rapid transition from cow-towed worker to Everyman for a great many individuals.

The Everyman will come together around things they value, and ideals they hold, and will create solutions where they see need, and similarly shape policy where they see unnecessary resistance, barriers to freedom and gate-keeping.

Part of the creation of the Everyman will include experience within multiple fields. Skill stacks will be the trait of the Everyman, and will make the Everyman phenomenally valuable to employers. The Everyman may own businesses, they may work for others, they may perform manual labor, they may perform cognitive labor. The phenomenon of the Everyman will emerge across all creeds and colors.

The Everyman will be driven by a desire to share of themselves openly, out of love, and a desire to assist others to gain the freedom and sovereignty they enjoy, and will be driven to act on these desires for others.

The Everyman will be quick to collaborate, slow to decide, deliberative in action, and cautious on impact. The Everyman will not become a lobbyist or activist, except where Government has over-reached into the liberties of the individual. The Everyman is a man of action, and will form action groups rather than lobby groups, only lobbying where drawing back government encroachments is needed.

Fundamentally, the Everyman will know the only thing that truly matters is how he spends his time to improve the lives of others, which cannot be measured in monetary terms.

It’s a perishable product.

Nihil, or, the state of nothingness, like meditative states, is valuable to spend some time in occasionally, where we can drop our pretenses of knowing, and become immersed for a time in a cognitive state of repair and restoration. Offloading the mental load of carrying meaning through the world, dusting ourselves, and our values off; a kind of values decontamination perhaps. Better analogies to follow.

But as a religious view (and it is making a meta-physical claim, so I have no qualms about calling it religious) that nothing has any meaning is inherently false.

The simple fact that this statement will piss off anyone invested in the religion of Nihilism is evidence of that.

If nothing has any meaning, then nothing I say has any meaning, and should be of no affect, and yet, to say it’s false causes effect.

The counter-argument is that we attribute meaning, and so that’s just the meaning the person being effected has attributed, but that’s a post-hoc justification. The fact remains that unless you continually search out, and remove meaning from your life, it, like plant life pushing through the soil of the seemingly barren earth, will continue to emerge.

That’s why an -ism is invariably required to continue to feed the demand for the supply of nihilistic ideas.

Think of Nihil more as a state of harvest maybe. Or maybe it’s more crop rotation… The emergent values and meaning have been played out, and, to the degree that they bear fruit, and the fruit is good, we continue in comfort allowing those values and meanings to continue to thrive uninterrupted. But where the fruit that is being borne from the things we hold to have meaning, or the values we permit to continue to emerge and compete across our subconscious landscape, but as the environment changes, the things that emerge don’t bear fruit, or the fruits are not acceptable in the meaning/value exchanges we trade on.

Pushing that analogy around a bit there… There’s a lot of directions this line of thinking is wanting to pull, which is, to me, an indication of high alignment with fairly solid, and/or fundamental, models of reality.

So, Nihil is, maybe, the act of clearing the field after harvest, and sure, we can decide what values or meaning to sew, or we can, if we’re brave or stupid, or a little of both, we can leave nature the hell alone, and see what emerges… but something will always emerge, regardless of what we want to try to enforce onto our meta-physical landscape.

The thing of it is, unlike the field where the tendency is for weeds to emerge unless a valuable crop is sewn, and the fields tended, the thing that emerges on our meaning landscape is a representation of what is authentically valuable and meaningful to us.

Nihilism is the selling of pesticides to attempt to create a scorched earth environment on your meaning landscape out of fear of the responsibility that emerges when one suddenly finds themselves with a garden to tend. (but lacking the tools, knowledge, experience or desire) Some feel helpless in the face of the changing seasons, where eventually our values play out their lifespan, and the land seems barren during the winter, and we feel lost and afraid that perhaps meaning will not re-emerge.

But as with any cycle of life, meaning will always find a way, no matter how much Nihilism you pour into your soul.

And you’ll always have to buy more, because it’s a perishable state you’re being sold.

…and how to get an “aught” from an “is”…

“What are you doing in the Game B space?”

Hell of a question.

Right now, I’m thinking.

That’s pretty much it. I’m thinking mostly to myself, because who the hell am I to be speaking?

And yet, against all odds and possibilities, some of you seem to be listening. Some of you, in a stroke, brilliance, or madness, are encouraging me to write. So, I guess that’s indictment enough, and now, much to the glee of my lovely, long suffering wife, I am now writing.

One thing that stands out to me is how much we are convinced of our own ideas. Not all of us, and not all the time, but there’s a general sense that we need to be “right” or, worse still, that we know, and can inform others, what “should” happen. Given the incentive structures that reward such behavior, fair enough. We tend to have a model that encourages elevation of authorities and consensus around them, with some level of objection, which tends to result in the elevation of a new authority. I suspect there’s a deeper layer to that though.

Being enamored with what comes out of our own brains is surely a necessary feature in driving us forward to action, or else how can we act? The idea that we can’t get an “aught” from an “is” doesn’t sit well with me, and I couldn’t really articulate it beyond “you can, because of course.” for the longest time.

So, here’s how to get an “aught” from an “is”… take full account of what “is”, including the disparity between the conceptual models, moral frameworks and various perceptions of reality. What we see isn’t all there is, and what we consider as objective reality isn’t all there is either.

Our disagreements are an “is”. The holes in our own perception are another “is”. So, how do we get an “aught”? By being curious. Which is another “is”.

It’s all “is” all the way down, and all the way back up again.

So, the “is” that is the desire to find what “is” reveals to us to the “aught” of what will discover more of what “is”.

Curiosity though is an inherently risky behavior, and certainly not for everyone to explore in every direction. Another part of the “is” is the various conceptual and cognitive toolsets possessed by an array of individuals.

I find myself thinking that perhaps there’s a great many people who see the value in embarking into new territories, that actually are better equipped to hold space and collate information, generate support structures, and supply chains, than explicitly delving into the very frontier themselves. I wonder at the possible demarcation between people who will simply explore regardless of the incentives or opportunities for reward, but rather will explore purely to sate their curiosity, and those who are likely to “capitalize” from the exploration of those intrepid few.

We reward the individual who not only has “right enough” answers, but who has the structure to convert that into an exchange. There’s also the emergence of the structures for converting answers into an exchange not requiring anything “right” at all, and in fact, there’s models that subsist on being bitterly wrong about reality.

But I distract myself.

I’m not convinced we’re adequately equipped to discover and support truly exploratory talent, because truly exploratory talent tends to reject, or at least rub up hard against, the preexisting social structures. That is to say, we’re limited to exploratory talent who are also capable of self-equipping, or are otherwise equipped, with structures to negotiate value exchange. There are huge societal systems intended to capture the largest return on the value exchange of the individuals they discover, uncover or recover.

But there are greater and greater cracks emerging where people who might otherwise be exploring for the sake of curiosity alone, who don’t “fall into” the societal nets to capture their productive capacity, fall by the wayside, or get lost amongst baser societal layers.

That’s kind of the thing… The truly exploratory tend to be catalytic. Or maybe cataclysmic. Maybe that’s the risk we’ve engineered society to manage. The capacity to hold

There are limits to our society level models of value discovery and extraction that I’m not sure provides adequate discovery mechanism or support to those who don’t fit the society level model of what we define as valuable methods for discovering or creating value.

My sense is that hyper-specialization and focus on speed and process optimization has tended towards disincentivising the discovery and support of uniquely talented minds that don’t “fit the mould” of what we conceive value to look like.

I feel that the value creation short game is getting progressively shorter, while the models of education are generating deeper and more rigid entrenchment for the individual in a world that is increasingly unbalanced.

That last sentence is a preliminary thought I need to spend some time with.

I could have been a bitcoin millionaire.

I know, I know everyone says that. “If only”. I mean it literally. I had the opportunity, the capital, the time and resources. I saw the value and the earning potential. I chose not to make that investment.

A friend who was in the tech space, who invested in travel, alcohol and toys, and as such, didn’t have much in the way of capital, was beside himself at the prospect of securing my participation in setting up a bitcoin mining operation in a warehouse space I had recently secured, encouraging me to invest a steady influx of the $3500 a week I was turning over in the bitcoin mining hardware he was able to source, to accumulate, over the course of 6 months, a very healthy mining operation.

He laid out the potential for securing this increasingly rare commodity in the early stages, to sell later as people sought to get into the cryptocurrency scene. I saw the potential, and having felt the desire to break away from conventional economic models myself, I could see the appeal.

But to take advantage of the opportunity would require crossing a self-imposed moral boundary. I could not take part in an activity that amounted to self-enrichment through participation in establishing barriers to entry. The barrier to entry being, the early adoption, and mass securing, of bitcoin, to control access to those who similarly saw the opportunity to experience a departure from the standard economic models.

The other thing that became more obvious to me the longer I followed cryptocurrency on and off, was that there was no way it was what it proposed to be. There was no way it could be, with the architecture and philosophy that it spawned from. Sure, it was a breakaway from the contemporary monetary system, but it was itself, another fiat system that relied on the same speculative model to determine value.

The principle of decentralization was something I adored the first moment I discovered it, and I am critical of models that promise decentralized control structures, because I desire a truly decentralized model. I didn’t see that with bitcoin. I saw, instantiated in the architecture, the capacity for capture, and control, of the “market” by any suitably backed individual or collective.

We are seeing the emergence of this very thing into the crypto space now with Facebook and Libre, backed by the big money players. Yes, there are arguments to be made that Libre isn’t cryptocurrency, but the capacity to capture mass control of the economic system remains to some degree that doesn’t sit well with me.

The Other Decentralized Game.

Game B is in a similar position. I am not convinced that Game B can yet live up to it’s own promises. The main promise is that it will eventually emerge to replace Game A, or conventional competitive models of behaviour.

Maybe I have both crypto and Game B all wrong, but it seems, at least in the majority and mainstream, to be competing for control of the narrative, and, more specifically, access through technological architecture and lexical gate-keeping. To play the Sense-making Game, you have to make sense to the self-appointed sense-makers.

Play Game B for fun and, more importantly, profit.

But I have hope far beyond what this piece might inspire one to believe.

In the same sense that I am finding an awful lot of the desired requirements for a truly decentralized economic system emerging in Holochain, I am also finding an awful lot of eschewing of what seems like speculative marketing of Game B control and influence systems, with truly emergent sense-making occurring.

I am loathe to think of things in the language of conflict and competition, so I’ll try out another framework for what I am seeing…

I see Two Methods. Two alternate paths into the future.

One being that of trade-offs, obligation, indebtedness and reliance, open to all, at a price.

The other is investment in collective well-being, emergent trends and support, open to all that share a desire for a degree of freedom not otherwise afforded.

Where one method will seek to become more broadly appealing, but narrower ideologically over time, the other will become more refined but more broadly exploratory of ideas.

I’m increasingly hopeful as I see this refinement emerge, and separate from the need to be broadly appealing.

It’s the differentiation from the old method I was waiting for.