HAHO 1.5 - Coercion and Networks
Contract law is ultimately about coercion. Government is a network operator. Governments have dominant coercive power and only collapse when their coercive power is trumped by another.
I recently came across the following talk that the former CEO of Twitter (current CEO of Block, aka Square) Jack Dorsey gave. Listening to Jack talk, I can tell he has been touched by the coercive elements of society. This is confirmed by the revelations from the Twitter files released by the new nominal owner of Twitter (X) Elon Musk. Jack had very little agency to do anything inside of Twitter by the end of his association with the popular social messaging platform.
First, it’s important to contextualize Jack’s comments are not coming from some anon keyboard ninja on the chans. This is coming from a very public person who was the nominal face and voice of what was once a very powerful platform for shaping public opinion which translates to the power to shape outcomes in the meatspace.
Some comments and thoughts, not always in chronological order, but the whole talk is worth listening to and internalizing for yourself.
Jack was the single point of failure at Twitter. He was the CEO and legally was the end point for all meaningful decisions.
A CEO’s authority or power is limited by many things, including the law (in all of the diverse jurisdictions Twitter operates - see Brazil’s actions against X today), social norms across diverse groups of users, financial constraints, the will of employees to continue maintaing the technology stack (Evan Weaver left long ago and many more left after Musk assumed ownership and control) and the influence of advertisers and other third-party service providers to maintain relationships with the company.
Jack’s talk is about crypto currency and, specifically, bitcoin’s ability to unbank the individual as a constraint on their behavior. What Jack doesn’t see is that no one is using their own personal computing device to transact in bitcoin - or any cryptocurrency. The physical personal devices, or hardware, is all a constraint that can be manipulated to grant or deny a person access to the bitcoin network. There are also the internet networks, from switches to routers to backbones and satellites that people use to transact in bitcoin - you have NO control over these critical third party infrastructure providers.
Jack identifies the developers, miners and nodes as the three parties defining bitcoin, but he somehow forgets to mention the totalilty of the userbase as the most important factor in the bitcoin network. No users and the best developers, datacenters (miners) and nodes and there is no bitcoin story to discuss. The network is 80% of the equation - the rest are just details. Jack also wrongly assumes that because HE does not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, that 1) he will never know who Satoshi is and 2) that Satoshi is not a government or aspiring government.
“There are known-knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” - Donald Rumsfeld
This was wild to hear coming from a person of Jack’s social status, but Jack points out the FACT that you “own” nothing already. Everything you think you own is implicitly a lease from your government (the sovereign). Whether it is a change in the assessed value of your unmortgaged home, a tax on your personal property which many municipal jurisdictions have, the income taxes, estate taxes and now we are talking about in vivo asset taxes!
When someone is born, their parents opt-in the child to their local government’s social system. In the US this comes with a Social Security ID and a unique number to begin monitoring and assessing each member’s compliance throughout their life.The stock market is a voting system, but it is more than just that because it correlates with purchasing power via asset values and the ability to 1) cash-out and 2) borrow against the nominal equity of the asset.
Jack is coming at the world through the experience of a tech priest and knows investors want to generate profits, but just because a business wants to make profits does not mean that profits for shareholders are wealth for shareholders. As I have mentioned before, our attitude about profit is defined by our experience and is founded with the idea that they are fruits for the entreprenuer. Profits in fact are just a risk premium which our society transfers to owners in good times. But risk is ALWAYS conserved, per physics, and thus profits are something that should really be conserved by the corporation for inevitable bad times. How many of the original Dow Jones Industrial companies are still going concerns today? hmm…
No profit for a company is equivalent to a person not eating enough calories. Companies require what they require to stay alive and the profit is fat. Biology drives the storage of excess calories as fat for future periods of calorie deficiency so the living organism can survive longer.
Negative cash-flow is economic cancer. Corporations don’t have just a profit incentive, they have a vital mandate to produce them!Electricity is a hard constraint for all users and service providers on the bitcoin network. Who has electricity sovereignty today? No one.
The people with the most energy sovereignty are actually those who have adapted to live under bridges and in forests.People already have sovereignty, they just don’t see or comprehend all of the ways they are dependent upon society (others) anymore. We are born with sovereignty, but lose a big chunk of it at birth just to survive - parents get to decide our fate and the government is keeping them on a close leash the entire way to make sure they are raising you to conform with the social operating system into which you are born.
Coercion is something most people only have limited experience with - thankfully. Most people live ordinary lives and do not attract the attention of the cultural enforcement system, but when a dispute arises it is always the coercive authority that decides the outcome - for better or worse. Whether this is an armed police officer or the Pentagon educating a government it is the same thing.
