It's worth adding that St. More's Utopia was not all that utopian compared to the aura and meaning that the term has gained over hundreds of years. It even has slaves, and a comprehensive system of penal slavery (under enlightened conditions).
I think Infovore is too pessimistic about tokenization and not pessimistic enough about the problems with the current web infrastructure. The current web infrastructure is very conducive to lots of fraud at enormous scale. The only way that the big players can effectively limit fraud on their ad networks is to do many things that are of questionable legality involving the abuse and cross-referencing of private data (e.g. Google spying on Gmail contents to determine whether or not an Adwords click resulted in a successful conversion: this is why Amazon started concealing cart contents in email notifications; Facebook and others buying access to credit card data to confirm conversions).
Moving more web business away from easily spoofed telemetry and comprehensive privacy violations to simple transactions of monetary units is a good and straightforward thing that requires less belief in innovation than the current model, which requires a belief in the magic AI fairy and the notion that the government is never going to figure out how to prosecute crimes online and how to regulate these obese multi-trillion dollar 'tech' turkeys. 'Web 3' is actually bearish on the notion that there is much more juice in the fancy-statistics-masquerading-as-SHODAN economy.
This fits with my thinking and with the thinking of Girard. Antagonism is driven by similarity. If two people can completely replace each other, they cannot coexist peacefully.
The more similar they are, the more crowded the field, the more attention will be paid to increasingly minor and even arbitrary distinctions. Arbitrary distinctions are open to manipulation and distortion; and as a basis for identity, lead to insecurity and anxiety.
I feel like humans are hard wired for a few things. One is definitely competition. Another seems to be religious devotion. In both cases, trying to remove existing outlets is only causing them to be recreated elsewhere.
Capitalism and sports are great ways to direct competition towards (mostly) positive ends, or to defuse it. Traditional religions are far from perfect, but overall I think they have tended to direct religious devotion towards positive ends. The newer religions of politics and wokeness (and more recently, public health) that have replaced them for many people have tended to promote far more destruction.
I don't believe we have a good, systematic theory for why, at times, zero sum competition seems to trump positive sum competition. Sure, we have varying individual tendencies and these might be encouraged or discouraged by societal structures, but I can think of very little to say beyond that.
That is, yes, productive alternatives to negative competition are good, but I don't know why, at some times, we get the development of Methodism and other times we get Thomas Aquinas telling us "In the kingdom of heaven the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss.”
It's worth adding that St. More's Utopia was not all that utopian compared to the aura and meaning that the term has gained over hundreds of years. It even has slaves, and a comprehensive system of penal slavery (under enlightened conditions).
I think Infovore is too pessimistic about tokenization and not pessimistic enough about the problems with the current web infrastructure. The current web infrastructure is very conducive to lots of fraud at enormous scale. The only way that the big players can effectively limit fraud on their ad networks is to do many things that are of questionable legality involving the abuse and cross-referencing of private data (e.g. Google spying on Gmail contents to determine whether or not an Adwords click resulted in a successful conversion: this is why Amazon started concealing cart contents in email notifications; Facebook and others buying access to credit card data to confirm conversions).
Moving more web business away from easily spoofed telemetry and comprehensive privacy violations to simple transactions of monetary units is a good and straightforward thing that requires less belief in innovation than the current model, which requires a belief in the magic AI fairy and the notion that the government is never going to figure out how to prosecute crimes online and how to regulate these obese multi-trillion dollar 'tech' turkeys. 'Web 3' is actually bearish on the notion that there is much more juice in the fancy-statistics-masquerading-as-SHODAN economy.
This fits with my thinking and with the thinking of Girard. Antagonism is driven by similarity. If two people can completely replace each other, they cannot coexist peacefully.
The more similar they are, the more crowded the field, the more attention will be paid to increasingly minor and even arbitrary distinctions. Arbitrary distinctions are open to manipulation and distortion; and as a basis for identity, lead to insecurity and anxiety.
I feel like humans are hard wired for a few things. One is definitely competition. Another seems to be religious devotion. In both cases, trying to remove existing outlets is only causing them to be recreated elsewhere.
Capitalism and sports are great ways to direct competition towards (mostly) positive ends, or to defuse it. Traditional religions are far from perfect, but overall I think they have tended to direct religious devotion towards positive ends. The newer religions of politics and wokeness (and more recently, public health) that have replaced them for many people have tended to promote far more destruction.
I don't believe we have a good, systematic theory for why, at times, zero sum competition seems to trump positive sum competition. Sure, we have varying individual tendencies and these might be encouraged or discouraged by societal structures, but I can think of very little to say beyond that.
That is, yes, productive alternatives to negative competition are good, but I don't know why, at some times, we get the development of Methodism and other times we get Thomas Aquinas telling us "In the kingdom of heaven the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss.”