Being Human on a Bitcoin Standard
Human consciousness is immortal, technology changes over time.
Students of history find a certain type of ‘clash of cultures’ passage scattered amongst ancient texts and anthropological recordings. It goes something like this:
Explorer: My G-d, look at this society, they seem just like us, but so primitive! Instead of X or Y, it appears that they subside using only Z. It does not appear that they have discovered the ways and uses of X, so they are trapped in their earlier ways.
It’s a trope that emerges during any meeting of disparate cultures, and many have imagined that upon the arrival of extraterrestrials to our world, emerging from their advanced spaceships, they would wonder why they had come at all to such a backwards and primitive place (can you believe humans still use nuclear power?!).
If we agree that human wants and desires are constant across history (think biological truths and Maslow), we have a base from which to consider how those wants and desires are realized, empowered, and eventually overexercised and betrayed by technological innovations throughout history.
In other words, culture and consciousness itself are downstream of technology. It is a recursive function, where the tools that we shape to change our world shape us right back.
Consider a few examples throughout history.
The Compass
How did individuals navigate prior to the compass?
Was it by landmark, the stars, or simply ancient knowledge?
The emergence and use of the compass as a technology allowed individuals to position themselves discretely in space. No longer was location free floating or confused by weather and seasonal conditions, now location was absolute, and what’s more, that location could be shared easily amongst fellow travelers. With the compass, getting where you, and others needed to go became finite, no longer a curious series of twists and turns.
The Printing Press
The Gutenberg Printing Press famously allowed the expansion of religion via the printing and distribution of the Bible. Through the technology of the printing press, we expanded from a humanity that was purely language, symbol and scribe, focused, to a humanity that could now transmit thought and idea across vast times and distances, and to massive audiences with no real decay.
Language exploded in importance and power as literate individuals were able to exercise their ideas across massive distances and times and with no mis-interpretation (imagine being literate in the 17th century as the equivalent of knowing Python today).
The Electric Light
Our final example, the electric light, changed our fundamental relationship with the natural cycles of sunrise and sunset, giving us access to clarity and vision on demand.
With the electric light, pleasure and work hours expanded into the early mornings and late evenings. City streets were better lit, and safer to traverse at all hours (especially if you were coming home from a late night at the office).
Imagine the millions of tiny individual experiences made better by the electric light (and then homes wired for electricity). The revolutions in home entertainment, the kitchen and the new time saving technologies, the humble bedroom lamp, allowing you to read that wonderful novel later into the evening.
… and Bitcoin?
Baked into every technology is not only the possibility of newer and greater self actualization, but also a rough edge that eventually grates against our nature.
We have gained immeasurably through the use and development of the Compass, the Printing Press, and the Electric Light, but have also empowered a culture that has fallen out of sync with our nature as human beings.
The Compass allowed discrete mapping, which became the satellite, the GPS, and now precision so absolute that not only are we able to calculate the mile splits on our weekend runs, but governments and private companies are able to track and monitor us without our express consent. We feel we are living in a panopticon, having lost our anonymity.
We know our absolute place, but it is used against us.
The Printing Press birthed an awakening of human consciousness as a result of shared thought, but that signal birthed the centralized editor, propaganda, and a glut of noise from which the modern individual has lost the signal. Trust in mutable centralized knowledge systems is tumbling.
We autodidact, but must now filter out biased presentation and editing.
The Electric Light, in the same fashion, allowed productivity and pleasure to expand, but to what end? Our sleep is disturbed and our culture demands we run faster on the work treadmill as barriers between work and life have all but disappeared. Human happiness is reduced in a go-go-go world.
Our useful hours have expanded, but without any limit.
So every technology, at its inception, carries with it great opportunity for the expansion and flourishing of human consciousness, but on a long enough timeline, that technology carries within it some betrayal of human nature.
Where we stand today.
Bitcoin is revolutionary technology and we are exploring the edges of the hard money world it is ushering in. Bitcoin culture is still in its earliest form and we are reaping only the immediate benefits of the hardest money on earth backed by the most powerful computer network in existence.
We are repairing the grating edges from older technologies that no longer serve us, and coming into greater alignment with our consciousness and nature.
Anonymity and freedom have been restored via the permissionless, participation, so we have stepped out of the modern panopticon.
Immutability and verifiable truth have been restored in the ledger, so that we can now point to a source of absolute historical fact.
A governor has been placed on our desire to move ever faster via ~10 minute block discovery and the difficulty adjustment, so we restore a basic relationship with time.
Decentralization, trustlessness, and permissionlessness are the keys to this earth changing innovation, and we have yet to fully understand how this will unlock human consciousness but we feel intrinsically that it brings us closer to our humanity.
So, Bitcoin is not an idol to be worshiped, but rather a tool whose uses must be fully explored , so we better understand what it means to be human.
