#miles hingston

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“Reality is a battle of opposing metaphors playing out/in the canvas of the collective mindscape.” Miles Hingston, Polytopian, Researcher, Writer, Introduction and Disclaimer, 2011 (via amiquote)

As you may be aware there has been a bit of a frenzy in the media recently regarding the virtual currency Bitcoin, most of which I’ve seen has fallen on the side of crap journalism (like here) from commentators who clearly don’t understand what Bitcoin is because they are trying to understand it from the old paradigm of monetary policy. This blog post isn’t really here to speculate on Bitcoin’s market price but rather talk about it’s potential as a p2p system for transferring value (as well as Ripple – more on that later).

Firstly, many critics are quick to argue that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, yet if they stopped for a moment and looked critically at their precious paper money they would realize that it too has no intrinsic value, nor does gold! What craziness is this I speak of? Let’s look at gold which is often touted to be a safe bet, gold has intrinsic properties that can make it valuable, but it doesn’t have intrinsic value. The economic value of a currency/commodity (gold is a commodity, not a currency) is contextualized by the subjective value judgements of the marketplace. Put simply, it’s a lot more complex and behavioural than it’s often made out to be, to quote the old idiom “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure”. Anyway, Bitcoin is valuable because it offers advantages over other currencies, that is a good thing! How many people stop to think that the state has a virtual monopoly over how most people economically exchange with each other?

If people really want to understand what Bitcoin is then they need to look at as a media technology, not a currency. At the moment the media coverage on it is largely analogous to when people were first talking about the Internet and fumbled around not really knowing what it actually is, nor its potential to transform society. Read Rick Falkvinge’s Why Bitcoin Is Poised To Change Society Much More Than The Internet Did and Paul Bohm’s reply to Is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin a good idea? to try and appreciate Bitcoin’s potential once society gets its head around it.

Anyway, let’s look at the wider virtual currency ecosystem. Bitcoin is clearly a disruptive technology, but not without its flaws. To mention one such flaw, despite the fact that Bitcoin is (in theory) decentralized, currently around 80% of all bitcoin trade happens on MtGox. Last time I checked their verification queue was over 15,000, that means that over 15,000 new accounts are waiting to be verified just so that people can buy Bitcoin. Long story short, if MtGox was compromised in any way (which has happened before) it would seriously disrupt the Bitcoin market. One way to remedy this issue is for people to use different exchanges or even better buy and sell Bitcoin p2p. Enter Ripple, which describes itself as “the world’s open payment network”. Ripple is what I consider to be the fundamental meta-system needed to allow virtual currencies to flourish. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ripple is “the next big thing” after Bitcoin once virtual currencies start to catch on and the infrastructure matures.

At the moment I’m sure a lot of new users would find that Bitcoin/Ripple is too difficult/inconvenient to use. There are certainly barriers to entry and there need to be more exchanges and escrow services. Anyway, if reading any of that has been of use to you then consider subscribing to following subreddits:

Bitcoin

Ripplers

CryptoCurrency

Related content:

Daily Digest April 13, 2013

Daily Digest April 4, 2013

Daily Digest April 3, 2013

Daily Digest April 2, 2013

The real cost of the virtual price

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On escaping "the system": The reality is that a vanishingly small number of us can survive without the industrial economy. The system has been designed to make us totally dependent on it and it’s worked like a charm. There is no gray area, you’re either part of the system or you’re most likely dead in less than a week.

How Our Environment Shapes How We Think https://mileshingston.com/status/url/560

What Will The World Look Like In 50 Years? https://mileshingston.com/status/url/559 (tl;dr fucked)

I will be divesting in Bitcoin if it goes below $50/BTC and frankly would rather focus on Ripple which has a lot more going for it.

Thought of the day… Bitcoin is The Dot Com Bubble 2.0, it didn’t have to be this way, but it was raped by speculation and shoddy infrastructure. Also pays to reflect on Bernard Lietaer’s quote "Complementary currencies are now where open source software and microfinance were 10 years ago." Just to give any of you *NIX users out there an idea of how mainstream open source was, 10 years ago was before Ubuntu even existed…

The Internet of Things (IoT) is seriously overrated. Botnet spam and surveillance par excellence…

*in a nerdy voice*… as you can see from looking at this chart there is a direct correlation between the popularity of Youtube and the stupidy of comments on Youtube. #collectiveintelligence

Much better journalism: The promise of Ripple https://mileshingston.com/status/url/556

More Crap Journalism by Idiots… Introducing Ripple, a Bitcoin Copycat https://mileshingston.com/status/url/555

Related content:

Daily Digest April 4, 2013

Daily Digest April 3, 2013

Daily Digest April 2, 2013

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Obvious media trolling attempt of Bitcoin… is obvious. Continue to use your devaluating fiat currencies and support central banking fraud.

Keep Calm and Carry On – just ignore the fact your purchasing power is diminishing https://mileshingston.com/status/url/544

I know I’m posting a lot about Bitcoin recently, but I find it hilarious reading some of the grossly ignorant opinions on it. For the record I see Bitcoin as somewhat flawed, but a necessary step towards better currency innovation.

Bitcoin isn’t illegal because it isn’t *real* money https://mileshingston.com/status/url/543 (all abstractions are equal, but some abstractions are more equal than others…)

The yoke’s on you BBC: BBC arrogantly laugh at Bitcoin https://mileshingston.com/status/url/541 (reminds me of this… https://mileshingston.com/status/url/542)… “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." — Alvin Toffler

While The Violin Plays: Catastrophic Sea Level Rise Is Now Occurring https://mileshingston.com/status/url/540

Why #Bitcoin is poised to change society much more than the Internet did https://mileshingston.com/status/url/539 (well just step back and think about it from a media ecology point of view, the use of money is far more influential and prolific in peoples’ lives)

2013 Wintertime Arctic Sea Ice Maximum Fifth Lowest On Record https://mileshingston.com/status/url/538 (According to Guy McPherson expect an ice-free Artic as early as summer 2015)

Chimps Have Metacognitive Ability https://mileshingston.com/status/url/537 (silly humans thinking they are the only species to have self-consciousness, maybe if humans could speak "animalish" then we’d realise who the aliens on this planet really are…)

Related content:

Daily Digest April 3, 2013

Daily Digest April 2, 2013

On Storytelling

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OuiShare posted an article recently about another up-and-coming collaborative consumption platform, StreetBank. The collaborative economy is really picking up the pace, or maybe I’m just reading more about it? HBR doesn’t think so. Ofcourse, this is a reasonable expectation given the rise of network society, the structuring of organizations and workflows around a dynamic hyperconnected medium. Increasingly, we are able to cut out the middleman and go straight to the information, resources or people we need for our desired end and that’s what the peer-to-peer marketplace is trying to facilitate. There are problems though, one of which I will touch on here.

I happen to have a friend who is developing what I would describe as a social mapping platform which could be used for asset mapping and therefore resource sharing in a similar way to other collaborative consumption platforms. My friend though would like to create a meta-system whereby he is able to aggregate data from multiple sources and display it in one place. Sort of like how Google has positioned itself as a “meta-web” by indexing the web and providing a de facto search platform. Unlike Google, he doesn’t have the resources available to crawl the web and scrub data to fit his specifications. So whilst it might be a good idea, I doubt that concept will work. At least, not unless different platforms collaborate (federate) with each other.

The problem at present is that trying to provide such a service would ultimately undermine the business models of other platforms should they provide an open API to their data sources. Just like Facebook would vapourise if you could up and take your Facebook friends with you to Google+ or Twitter or whatever. Collaborative platforms like StreetBank, whilst they allow people to exchange in a p2p fashion, they are still functionally equivalent to walled gardens. Is this merely because there are holdups in adopting new business models which would allow for data portability? I don’t think so, whilst you could argue that each platform serves a different audience/purpose there is certainly a lot of overlap and commonality which warrants a collaborative effort.

The main holdup in my opinion is the lack of commercially-viable distributed social network platforms/protocols, it’s architectural. The underlying network architecture needs to evolve first and until it does we’re going to have hundreds of sites out there for sharing the same things. Maybe as Facebook becomes more commercial it will let people sell and swap things with their friends and more people will see the benefits of this kind of p2p arrangement and then (hopefully) the subsequent need for a distributed platform. Ofcourse, one thing that will spur this on is the development of the Internet of Things. At present, the best option I know of is Sharetribe, but as far as I know it doesn’t federate and lacks the kind of inclusive “social” features that these days people expect. Any UI/UX designers out there? Go help the opensource community.

I want to reflect on a few things. My motivation for blogging isn’t particularly high right now, on top of that I will be travelling soon and will have my interests elsewhere. I’ve purposely removed myself from a lot of “noise” online and it’s nice to have more time to reflect upon things and read more. I do post status updates on a self-hosted microblogging service if readers of this blog are interested in some of the content I’m mulling through and my (usually pessimistic) tone on things. That said, posting a status update is usually a mindless and even narcissistic behaviour for most people and I’d like to think that my blog entries are a bit more mindful and considered (sometimes).

My overall focus, if you like seems to circle around the challenges (contentions?) and transitions that I foresee looking forward. Whilst I’m interested in ramifications of political technological, social and economic upheavals, more recently I’ve been thinking about the frankly daunting and depressing ecological realities and post-industrial society. I stand by the words in the closing paragraph of my last entry where I suggested that we should each create and embody our own transformative story. Don’t give your power and consent away to an outside authority, be it people or technology in the hope that they will deliver the kind of World you want to live in. On that note, there are a lot of people riding the a utopian transhuman pipe dream right now, the so-called techno-optimists, in the hope that radical technologies will save us from our own pitiful self-destruction.

I may be frugal, but I’m not a luddite. Certainly technology has it’s place, but it is inherently anthropocentric, has real constraints (physically, ecologically, politically, economically, socially etc) and will always yield unexpected consequences (higher complexity = higher entropy). I don’t doubt that advanced technologies are being created, what I doubt is that they are sustainable and have the capacity to “fix all our problems” ala Abundance is our future. It’s painful to listen to people like Peter Diamandis arrogantly spout their crap of “abundance” whilst the planet lies in tatters. If techno-centric society has a future it will be because it is indistinguishable from nature.

I’m putting this entry up partly in response to an email I received from a member of the Metromorphosis team, of which Netonomy is being featured in the script. The email I’m referring to was essentially asking what aspects of my work (and/or philosophy) I feel are most important to get across.

Firstly, I don’t consider myself a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination even though I often deliberate on worldly issues both online and offline. Everyone holds values and judgements which are subject to change and yet shape their model of the world. People are not models though, they are living organisms, just as a photo of what English people call an “Orange” is not the same as what it actually depicts. It seems redundant to mention this as one would hope it was common sense, but judging from the way most humans seem to interact with “the world” they live firmly within abstractions most of the “time”. It seem futile to try and unravel given that language is the Pandora’s Box that I’m wrestling with using language itself (infinite recursion).

Anyway, I don’t want to toil too much with the philosophy of language, rather I want to talk about storytelling, something which I’ve rambled about a bit in the past (including my now defunct Youtube channel). I would much prefer to call myself a storyteller (or logomancer if I’m feeling arcane – literally meaning magickian of The Word) rather than a philosopher, it just seems more fitting. To put it as simply as possible, people (no matter how scientific/objective they claim to be) make sense of “the world” through stories (or narratives/models if you like… pick a sign for your sign). It’s not just a case of people telling stories to make sense of “the world”, but that your very identity (ego) is inseparable from that socially constructed reality and that “you” are comprised of stories that “you” tell yourself and the stories that Others/others tell of “you”… “I’m father and a husband, I’m 32 years old, I live in London…”.

Your mind is not inside your head, but between the Others/others whom you are minding for and with.

Tell the same story often enough and with enough conviction and it becomes a reality for an individual or a group, to such an extent that it filters other perceptions to ensure its own integrity. Once a story takes hold it becomes very difficult for people to let go of it because a new story challenges who they think they are in relation to “the world”.

“The single greatest barrier to the needed economic transformation may be the prevailing cultural story that there is no viable alternative.” – David Korten

All stories, just like everyone’s lives, eventually end, however unsettling that may be. Death is a necessary and integral part of life, there cannot be life without death. Taking heed of that brings forth an appreciation of our own mortality, of our vulnerability and humility, and of our cyclical relationship with the Earth and other living beings (interconnectedness). That I believe is the first thing people need to do is to accept that life is all change, that you can’t bottle up your life as it is now or as it was 5 years ago and hold on to that for as long as you want. There are many things outside our ability to control and the inevitability of death is one of them. Frankly, the culture of the western world suffers from a chronic aversion to death as is evident by the zealous glorification of lifestyles filled with material extravagance and soulless synthetic substitutes of contact with the real living world.

You can’t change “the world” unless you change your story.

The status quo desperately needs a culture shock (TEOTWAWKI) to wake them up from the unreality of the lives that people lead. Only when peoples’ perception of “the world” is viscerally fractured can people begin to tell new stories and begin to steer the culture in an authentic new direction and not some “feel good” fad. Sadly, most people are resigned to living within the same old stories and I contend that the kind of changes and transformation that are needed on this planet won’t happen fast enough because of our lack of empathy and embodied wisdom as well as fervent denial that anything is amiss and fear of change due to entrenched egotisms along with a general lack of consensus on the future.

“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” — Arthur Miller

By my reckoning we have a window of opportunity of around 15 years to get our shit together (i.e. radically depart from the status quo of today) before things are totally out of whack and civilization collapses*. If the present status quo continues I can only see it leading to a world of “barbarization” as put forward by the Global Transition Initiative. There is a real prospect of mass splintering of society and class warfare, we are already seeing the first signs of that with the political war of attrition against the working and middle class and  the increasing calls for succession in various regions which will likely escalate. I’ve come to reluctantly accept that until most people are suffering the same kind of daily strife and impoverishment there will continue to be abundant apathy and lack of solidarity because of damage done to communities over decades.

As I said in my last entry (which unfortunately was lost due to a server outage), calls for optimism or pessimism oversimplify the complexity of the world in which we live. How you feel about the the future depends entirely on the context and coherence of the narratives that you subscribe to and make sense of the world and the extent to which future developments deliver the kind of world you expect to be living in. My advice would be to create your own transformative story and live it, embody it, as much as possible. In-spire (breathe).

See also:

What listening to a story does to our brains.

The Ascent of Humanity

* Collapse may be sudden or prolonged and will not happen evenly across the world, but certainly the contagion of collapse is unstoppable (at least in bringing down globalization, i.e. supply chains needed by industrial nations). Some might argue we have already entered into the beginning stages of global descent, a “twilight era”. It really depends what statistics we want to refer to, but in my view we reached “peak civilization” about 40 years ago. Obviously the “winding down phase” of post-industrialization takes some time to filter down into consensus awareness, just like the reality of climate change and it’s fervent denial.

Related content:

Syzygy: Mythos

Language is a virus from outer space…

Syzygy: Waking and Dreaming

Netonomy: Foreword

Cultural idealism

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I want to follow up on an entry I published about a month ago regarding “jobs” and “employment”. As consumer capitalism flails and falls by the wayside with its glaringly high entropy and obsolescence, it is absolutely essential that labour is unshackled from institutionalization (i.e. “jobs”). “Jobs” are a product of industrial society, those typified by economic growth. However, as economic growth becomes untenable and businesses continually streamline their processes through automation, society is left with deep structural unemployment and wealth inequality. More people find themselves with less disposable income and so they consume less and have lower social mobility. Less consumption = less economic growth, lower social mobility (enmasse) = civil unrest. The knee-jerk political reaction is “we need to create more jobs (to appease the rowdy peasants)”, and so they try and create jobs with policies that just kick the can down the road a bit longer without actually addressing the long-term social implications of structural issues caused by fallacious economic assumptions.

We are living in a very different social reality now and yet we are governed by economic policies and social contracts from the 20th century. The reality is that formal “jobs” are going to become harder to find, and those that are out there are being competed for internationally. We have reached what some call “Peak Money” (see also Peak Debt), a situation where money has become scarcer and scarcer due to over-financialization of the economy. Money is utterly failing to meet the needs of most people, but it shouldn’t be too surprising once people have learnt it was designed that way.

How are people going to support themselves without a paying “job”?

As I say in the aforementioned entry:

The solution is definancialization on the one hand, to step outside the (conventional) monetary paradigm and have a voice. And on the other hand embracing an adhocratic society, one in which organizations have loose boundaries.

On the one hand I’d like to see work become less monetized rather than more monetized. Part of the problem with the current system is that it treats money as a commodity rather than a contract between parties (which is really what it is). The more we monetize things the more we abstract our relationship with “things” because we turn relationships into commodities which are then transacted, and in doing so create a reality so reduced and removed from the “messy” (non-linear) real world of living beings. Idealistic as a non-monetary system may seem, it is arguably the longest used throughout history and the most sustainable, it is however largely limited in scalability due to the limits of human psychology.

Ultimately, as the institutions around us fail we need new social contracts to respond to our changing circumstances. We must change our definition of work and the stigma and shame around “unemployment” and the so-called “Lost Generation“, to move from unemployed to unworking. As I’ve already said unemployment is not the issue, income is, and the best way to remedy that is redistribution of wealth and allowing economic diversity for new systems to emerge. Those where people are free to develop themselves and contribute to society as they choose. Imagine the kind of innovation that would open up if people were freed from the drudgery of “jobs”, its not like the World doesn’t need creative solutions right now. As Nick Meador keenly points out, “jobs” are to the detriment of our own creative genius:

The most creative visionaries often cannot function adequately in modern society. This makes it extremely hard to avoid unemployment, let alone to feed and shelter oneself. But admit that you feel this way, and you’re instantly labeled lazy, arrogant, elitist, etc. We’re evidently not ready to admit on a mass scale that the current definition of a “normal” human being is not only imaginary, but impossible.

The fact that it seems nearly impossible to build a stable, secure, happy life in the segment formerly known as the “middle class” by doing worthwhile work that makes a real human difference is the exception that proves the rule, illuminating just how deeply, and perhaps fatally broken our economy is. — Umair Haque

We must move beyond the vacuous cycle of being an employee and being a consumer, living to work, working to earn, and earning to consume.

We need a third way that offers people work, resilience and authentic meaning. In my view, that cannot come from the Central State or the global corporate workplace: it can only come from a relocalized economy in revitalized communities. — Charles Hugh Smith

See also:

Are jobs obsolete?

What could the future of work look like?

Hard at Work in the Jobless Future

Yes, the collaborative economy is destroying jobs. So what’s next?

Who Will Get This Economy Going? No One

Related content:

Dialogue as value added

Netonomy: Employment

Sustainable cities… an oxymoron?

Netonomy: Social Enterprise

Netonomy: Peer Production

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