Humanity is used to being complacent, almost like a natural instinct to allow the forces of the universe massage our environment. Complacencey appearing like a trait that allows the directing hands of a parent move their child as they learn and grow. Its real root however is one of many factors that make up the altruism in our species, its part of our passive and peaceful ways that the very high majority of individuals aspire to and preach. This factor of peace and love is clearly being hampered and destroyed by contradictions in our societies.
(people push train after mans leg gets stuck)
But here we are, in a state where the high majority are humming for social change. Our complacencey has left us with the most selfish and greedy in unaccountable positions, sitting in high chairs way above our heads, but not out of our reach. Their existence isn't just a fad, or an 'unlucky time'. Nope, its systemic and static and permently broken. Now our complacency stops. The masses more and more creak their neck and look up, shouting for centuries at our masters, and screaming in full solidarity at them for the past decade. We don't even want to go back to before 2008, nope we want to go back on track with the elements of the universe, to trudge forward. We want our children to experience complacency but from a more advanced system with less breakable cogs.
Distributed Ledger Technologies (blockchains, hashgraphs, bitcoin, iota...) bring about a completely different system with completely different cogs. It is a different political economy that allows our tools to be more efficiently and freely available and also allows our rights and liberties to be more efficiently managed. For every interaction in our political economy today a smart contract can replace those relevant systemic cogs with a piece of code that is publically viewable and written in a program language that is easy to read.
Think about one element of our local authorities, distribution of funding. Currently money is allocated by a central government, the local authority then distributes the money to the relevant sectors in our community. The management and passing of these funds means uncountable interactions between staff in the council, staff in private banks, the central bank, the government and more. For the majority of job functions its mundane, messing with excel sheets, emails and clicking buttons. All of this happening in a society where being greedy and selfish means success. All of it happening behind closed doors with a patch work of visibility, yet no direct accountability. Multiple layers of corruption.
(source: CNN)
From the perspective of a smart contracts in a DLT system, things are completely different. There are only two entities:
- The smart contract that collects taxes and distributes to councils
- The smart contract that accepts from funds from above and distributes to services
Each of these smart contracts can be viewed by anyone. Say a local resident wants to query the distribution of funds to schools, because some issue has come up, then they would just query the smart contracts. Freedom of information on steriods. Smart contracts only cost money to deploy and update. Costs are measured in mico-cents (less than €0.01) but do not cost anything to read. So now say the resident finds an issue, some funds given wrongly. The resident can highlight the problem and a publically viewable update can be produced.
(source: Can Stock Photo)
The amount of wealth and resources we produce is enormous and as we all know due to wealth distribution it is mainly stuck at the top. Imagine a society where this extra wealth (the wealth owned by the 1%) is distributed back into society. Its hard for us to imagine, as adults we have developed in a more fuedal system of hierchy. We may see the fruits of this next post-scarcity system before we die but it those that develop under its nature that will truely experience it. They will be the 1st humans back on track after centuries of aristocracy. Yes it sounds utopian, of course it does to us, but there is no utopia and we will be like the grumpy granny in early 1900s USA wild west. Swinging on our arm chair with a shotgun from past glories on our laps, giving out how lucky the young are. Telling terrible stories of gangsters, human trafficking, slave trades, homeless families. Recalling the now distant memories of smarmy aristocrats that laugh and spit on our misfortune.