The forces that we are conjuring up are not volitional, nor likely to be any time soon. They are not, in any plausible sense, conscious. But nor are they avatars of the unthinking chaos at the heart of the universe. We will not ever fully understand them, but we do not fully understand markets, bureaucracies, democracies or the other complex systems that we have created over the last couple of centuries. We live among them, we try to moderate them, and we set one against the other to create some room in which we can live our lives.
Doing this well is the worthy aim of policy - but it is very hard to keep to that aim through the circus and confusion of gaudy imagined futures. To dispel bad metaphors, we need good ones: not just systems of thinking but concrete images that are as powerful as the images of angels and magicians and of vast, unthinking inimical forces, but that conduct debate in more useful directions. . . ."
Just a quick word on Google's constitutional cybernetic. The worlds most universally admired constitution has degenerated to a point where its become indistinguishable from a monarchy. For the post-Good Google Behemoth that is probably a feature not a bug.
So one of our first tasks as cryptoanarchists is to squash Google ( and Meta ) like a bug.
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