thinking about the function of law in the field between materiality and language

Last Notes

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The SEC would have to get on nostr, and then get its nostr account hacked before announcing, before it can approve. Those are the rules.

2024-01-03 17:18:42 UTC

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Classic NFT cycle—Come in for community and miss out on generational wealth due to irony poisoning.

2023-12-20 23:40:43 UTC

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Likewise! Glad to see nostr hasn’t been devoid of rizz in my absence 🤙

2023-12-20 20:29:40 UTC

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I see where you’re coming from—but I think the problem is that too much gets lost in the gap between people’s inherent conception of rights and the reasons why those rights should or should not be infringed. Even if it’s the case nothing is owed to explain why a right should exist, there has to be an articulable reason why it shouldn’t be taken away if there’s a belief that doing so is necessary for some higher-order reason (e.g., national security).
My fear is that when lawmakers go into the chasm to learn about crypto, they leave without having anything concrete to assuage these higher-order concerns. E.g., if a politician goes in to learn about crypto with the belief it can be used to fund terrorism, but is willing to be persuaded otherwise, it is going to be tough to move their position when most of the readily-accessible knowledge base they can draw from is comprised of middling statements like “it’s not that widespread,” or “it’s not as bad as banking.”
I’m not saying they can’t also weigh those alongside the other positive benefits crypto can offer, but that those benefits are easier to dismiss or devalue in the absence of other positions that directly clash with the specific issue—especially one where the consequences under consideration (e.g. terrorism) are taken so seriously by those in government.

2023-12-19 23:52:16 UTC

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@npub164q…2rl3 - Should have tagged you in this too. Just got back to Nostr after listening. Thanks for the great and thoughtful content!

2023-12-19 23:47:19 UTC

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Don’t disagree with your sentiment. One general problem I see in the counter-messaging to Warren’s bill/views (and others like it) is too much emphasis on the principles behind crypto, and not enough on the reality of what can be done to address the bill’s concerns.
Government tries to solve problems (real or imaginary) that it believes (rightly, wrongly, or duplicitously) the public is incapable of solving itself. I want to see more messaging and discussion that is literally as direct as possible—e.g. “How Bitcoin stops terrorist financing” or “Why crypto is a better alternative to eliminate terrorist financing than the government and big banks.” Even the Blockchain Association’s November 15 letter to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee was lukewarm—only stating that proposed regulations would be “counter productive” to national security interests with a citation to a single WSJ letter to the editor from a different crypto lobbyist that effectively said “blockchains are public, so terrorists don’t like using them.” True or not, it’s too abstract.
Legislators that barely know how to use google need to be persuaded by offensive messaging and education that is tangible, which means discussing and demonstrating the utility of solutions to the problem they’re confronting. It’s against these concrete backdrops that the more ethereal appeals to freedom, equality, etc., can be contextualized—and against which the government’s alternatives can be evaluated.

2023-12-19 23:05:35 UTC

@npub1hyq…k7cp - Just listened to The Progressive Bitcoiner episode you were on. Your discussion of meme culture made me think of this other podcast episode you might find interesting: https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/checkpoints-ruby-justice-thelot-third-spaces
TLDL: The podcast presents Ruby Justice Thelot’s case study on how communicative “third spaces” can exist on internet platforms (in this case, tens of thousands of YouTube comments accumulating over almost a decade under a video for the soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest)—and some of the challenges censorship or centralized platforms may pose to those structures. It dovetails into a discussion of what that means for the “Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet,” which is just a more academic way of saying “how online echo chambers are created.”
I find it to be a pretty compelling anecdote for thinking through the value of things like censorship-resistance, accessibility, and the role of media and platforms generally.

2023-01-20 04:13:42 UTC

Here's a bit of a meta question for those out there on nostr who are more savvy than me: What would be the best way to conduct a poll on nostr without having to worry about creating a massive reply chain? Thought about using some sort of "1 sat payment = vote yes / 2 sat payment = vote no," but that seems a bit hectic.

2023-01-08 18:51:19 UTC

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HFT's current stage is a point on a really interesting through-line of how systems align themselves to push information exchange to its limits. We've gone from shouting hawkers bartering in open-air markets to skyscrapers filled with floors of traders shouting into phones to 5 quants doing math in a basement server room.

2023-01-06 21:53:44 UTC

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Thanks both! I'll check each of these out. I've had a tendency to come at this sort of stuff from what I guess I'd say is a more speculative point of view, but I think we're seeing complexity getting directly injected into people's realities at a time that's faster and more palpable now than I've ever felt before (not that I've been around that long...). Hence the ask -- I've been looking to dig even further into more "rigorously analytical" approaches like the ones you've each cited.

2023-01-02 20:06:23 UTC

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So now we're at the endgame and all the land on earth/the moon/mars has been transformed, and the only un-transformed acreage capable of supporting human life is 2 billion lightyears away on Planet 281AC. No one will let the tenant onto their acreage for free because the tenant always smells bad and needs to shower constantly. All the rockets on earth are owned by the Musk family. The tenant would love to build their own, but unfortunately all the materials needed to do so are on other peoples' lands. Either the Musk family lets the tenant use a rocket, or people pitch in to get the tenant the resources needed to make one. In either scenario the tenant's ability to escape coercion is dependent on others, but self-ownership means no one has to help the tenant out. It's not clear why they would help the tenant out either. It's much cheaper and easier to just let the tenant work to stay on your land (where they can shower) than it is to build a starship, and so the feudal model remains.

2023-01-02 18:09:25 UTC

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Makes sense, I don't think it should be an issue either because obviously nostr is just the delivery mechanism for the invoice and not where funds transfer, but the fact Apple is trying to take 30% of gas fees paid through a Coinbase wallet always has me concerned about in-app purchase mission creep.

2023-01-02 18:01:36 UTC

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Any concern about Apple trying to restrict invoicing for SATs over nostr through Damus (I missed the beta by two days so not sure how it works in the app)? Not saying they're in-app purchases, but I was curious given its earlier attempt at getting coinbase to pay up for gas fees.

2023-01-02 17:53:12 UTC

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I don't get the point of making this demand/argument. If Spooner's theory is the strongest argument in favor of self-ownership then ostensibly Rothbard's/all others' are weaker by comparison, and thus subject to critique as is the case here. Just because someone isn't attacking "the strongest argument" doesn't mean the positions being taken against "weaker arguments" are wrong.
I think the major problem with “self-ownership” principles is that they are based on an idea of property and people that is just too narrow. At the end of the day, all we are dealing with are objects and the relations between them. Whatever relational system “property” exists in, it’s far more multidimensional than the classic “I used my body to grow this food” model that is still at the root of self-ownership takes.
I made that joke about living on an island earlier, but let’s look at the problem from the other side with a different thought experiment. There’s a show on Apple TV + called “See,” where everyone in the future is blind. Let’s say that a neuralink-type device gets invented that allows everyone to integrate real-time models of their physical reality with those of everyone else on the network, essentially allowing people to virtually see the world around them (don’t worry I’m not spoiling anything). Do we have self-sovereignty over our bodies in that scenario? No – the entire ability of our bodies to operate (with sight) is now predicated on a common dimension of dominion over (a) material reality, and (b) the linguistic/mental reality that forms the new vision model.
Sure, you might think you can assert self-ownership by choosing not to get chipped, or by turning the program off. But you haven’t really demonstrated bodily autonomy. All you’ve really done is choose to live in one of two different dimensions of reality – a binary choice predicated on the fact the chip-network reality was created through a common-ownership schema. So, common ownership still overdetermined your self-ownership decision making. You didn’t have autonomy, you had one of two choices about how to relate to the rest of the world. More than that, the common ownership vision model could end up overdetermining the entire material world you’d want to try to assert self-ownership over, and you’d be rendered inert.
The experiment seems dystopian – and it started that way. But now there’s a risk one centralized entity or group of actors could flip the switch and make the whole-world blind. Well, that’s where decentralization and identity within networks comes into play. If this virtual dimension is out of the domain of a central source of control, and it can perfectly map one-to-one everyone’s state within it, then we should be good. But we haven’t created self-ownership, we’ve only ensured that the integrity of the common-ownership relational structure is preserved.
All this to say is that a rights framework that approaches objects in the world without considering the dimensions in which people and objects operate is going to fall short of providing a sustainable worldview for the future. And before you say this example is too far-fetched, keep in mind that literally every digital innovation created today exists and operates in the same domain the vision network does – one of thought and ideas.

2022-12-31 21:02:45 UTC

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When I think social media balkanization I think demarcation, along echo chambers like Parler, Truth Social, etc. Idk if that is good - but I don't think that's what's you're getting at. The creation of those channels highlights how information follows entropic forces more than just sociopolitical ones. Information, whether true/fake/political/etc. just wants somewhere to go. From that perspective, scale within a closed system is inherently unstable because entropy augers toward chaos. The fragility of those systems is exacerbated by forces like profit interests, political interests, safety concerns, etc. What's going on right now feels to me like a way to allow information to be channeled in a more stable way without the fragility created by the weight of those centralized interests. In the aggregate, these more balkanized platforms are still creating the infrastructure for information/media to scale as much as it is allowed.
Sociopolitically speaking, I think efforts to do things that further decentralize social media access are good for people who live in worlds where these more fragile systems distort reality (however you want to define that, but basically I'm just saying people should be on the same page), or where they're dispossessed of the information or means to really live in an equitable and free society.
But if my original assumption about information entropy is correct, continued balkanization toward individual sovereignty over information isn't really a question of good or bad, because it feels like it's inevitable. What's good or bad is going to be determined by what people do with the freedom to create information, and that's a much bigger discussion imo.