If I didn't have to worry about anything, I'd wander around looking at the stars: a dream of Arcadia; totally free, not very powerful.

Since I need to eat to live, my ways are constrained; I can farm, gather, hunt; I'm less free for my constraints, but more powerful & energetic. https://twitter.com/DanielleFong/status/1250857149871382529

Together, you can I can produce more than both alone -- we form a system that has greater power than our sum. But this requires even more constraint: instead of both hunting - close to our idyll - you lead the ox and I push the plow. Again, the sacrifice of freedom for production

Scale this process up further: now I spend 15 years in school so I can work long hours at a very narrow job in a very small cubicle, in return for lots of money with which I can pay for my small city apartment & delivered foods.

I have very little freedom, in that all the space I live in is owned by something greater than me: the system I help constitute. My choices are bound by the options it provides. But the system itself is incomprehensibly powerful for our collective efforts.

If this system allocates a good share of this profit back down to me & the others that compose it, as compensation for the freedom we sacrifice to constitute it, then its yoke is tolerable. We can use this for our personal, libidinal freedoms - wandering, drugs, sex, whatever.

If, as we see today, the system fails to do this well, and instead reinvests all its excess profits back into its future productive capacity, its yoke becomes too heavy for us to bear. We sacrifice freedom for the constraints of power, but get only subsistence in return.

So this is the general form of the trade-off: I sacrifice my freedom of action for systemic power, with the promise that I'll share in the general profits of our enterprise.

When this promise isn't upheld, we have two broad options: i) break the system, repent its power, and restore our primitive freedoms. This is compelling, but our world can't sustain this many humans without immense systemic power, so (i) represents demographic catastrophe.

Or (ii) we anneal the system, reform its architecture, and force more profits & freedoms for those who constitute & operate it. This requires ever-greater cleverness and finesse: fewer and fewer paths through the system's phase space achieve our desiderata.

Here, in the limit of (ii), we get a paradisiacal dream of fully automated luxury space communism, like the Culture: maximizal hedonistic freedom, no need to work or constrain ourselves to support the system. Power for nothing! Free lunch for everyone!

But I worry that (ii) is also a trap -- the problem is not just with ownership & profit-sharing, but inherent in the ends of the means of production themselves. The system has every incentive to increase its power at our expense -- the system cares for its own libidinal freedom!

The moment we're not needed for the system of production to operate - when it's finally escaped its human substrate - we become misallocated resources to be liquidated and repurposed. There is no free lunch, and fully automated luxury space communism is just a dream.

So, I think, these are the general boundaries on our governance problem: How do we maximize both human freedoms and systemic power? How do we avoid losing control of the tools we depend on, & becoming subservient to them?

I don't have a good answer to thse problems. I think formulating the question properly is a big step forward, because it allows us to grossly carve our solution-space, differentiating what could work from what's counter-productive.

I think a few things are especially promising paths: decentralized localism promises greater human freedom & systemic robustness, without sacrificing much systemic productivity. Cryptoeconomic governance suggests a way to formally achieve & certify a broad class of goals.

One dream of the future is a fully decentralized, cryptoeconomic market for arbitrary productive tasks. We have the greatest freedom to pick and chose, & are compensated by the marginal value we produce; a sort of crypto-syndcalism. https://twitter.com/metadiogenes/status/1248472242331078658?s=19

But that's certainly not the only path, and has its own perils & dangers. We have not seen an opportunity like this moment in a long while. The future is as wild and free, and whatever we dream we can build.