Degen communism: the only correct political ideology. Vitalik Buterin's new manifesto.

I don't know what he means by "degen" (degenerate?) or "communism", but the general idea of anonymous internet chaos taking lots of risks and exploring lots of different directions combined with algorithmic methods designed to integrate the information from different tribes to form a general pressure in the direction of public-good seems cool and aligned with what we're doing here.

I'll have to read more closely, but there are a few points I disagree with as well. The emphasis on the global poor, on democracy as the final governance mechanism, and anti-nationalism just seem really short-sighted. Still, Vitalik is one of the only tech-adjacent billionaires to put his money where his mouth is about anything intellectually interesting at all.

>>1201

There may be a slight April Fool's touch, at least as to the choice of title, but having read the piece, it seems to accord with things Vitalik has written in the past.

I would translate the label as:

• degen => crypto-based decentralization
• communism => aiming for egalitarian outcomes through mechanism design.

This is a more progressive-leaning version of Balaji's program of crypto-based decentralization with a patchwork of entities, each of which can choose its own telos.

For my own part, I think aiming for egalitarian outcomes, whether through mechanism design or in any other way, is substantively bad. It's a mind virus that we need to just fight.

>aiming for egalitarian outcomes, whether through mechanism design or in any other way, is substantively bad. It's a mind virus that we need to just fight.

I'm into inegalitarian mechanism design. What if we wanted to cultivate the best people, or cultivate some other end that is not about people at all but subordinated the human to some higher end?

I should give some thought to an actually post-humanist moral teleology.

>>1210

> What if we wanted to cultivate the best people, ...

I agree with that. The welfare and quality of a society is upper-bounded by that of its best elements, and it's generally good to push that bound higher.

> ... or cultivate some other end that is not about people at all but subordinated the human to some higher end?

This is trickier. Christianity does this in trying always to serve "the greater glory of God," but it also has doctrines of alignment of God and humanity in the Incarnation and eschatology.

One can imagine "higher" ends that would just crush or eliminate humans altogether. Being human, I wouldn't want one of those.

So, for me, a constraint on any higher end is that it also be actually good for humans.

>>1211
>Being human, I wouldn't want one of those.

On the one hand, "ourselves and our posterity" is a good test for any proposed scheme of higher purpose, and much of my beef with the GAE is that it has abandoned this principle in favor of "America big stronk replace you cheap humanoid foreign you must submit" (and some retards actually believe it lmao). My objection to Vitalik's anti-nationalism, and various species of accelerationism as well, is that once you abandon "ourselves and our posterity" it's very hard to not just loot the commons and treat people like slaves for abstract bullshit that amounts in practice to dishonest profit for someone else. "Accelerate and immigrate" (abandon self interest but keep working hard doing things that will pump my bags).

That said, I don't think the self is actually a coherent moral reference point. A human self that has lost the ability to be the highest-performer for some materially advantageous higher purpose isn't really worth preserving. The opposite danger to forgetting your own interests is to forget the purpose that sustains you. You can become fake and useless, lose the mandate of heaven, and get exterminated that way. America is big into baiting this one too. Lots of idle rich, bullshit jobs propped up by obsolete political rights, and welfare to preserve false dignity.

So the synthesis strategy is you have to find some higher purpose that you and your posterity can be the best at, which has a material niche in the world. Miss any part of that and you're doomed.

>>1213
> I don't think the self is actually a coherent moral reference point.

The index is not the actually existing self. It's something like: "the best possible realization of the self consistent with human nature," which is necessarily an inferred exemplar.

Different philosophies offer different visions of this exemplar:
• For Christians, it is the person of Christ.
• For Nietzsche, it is the hypothesized Übermensch.
• Jung literally called this the "Self," as distinct from the mere "Ego."

>>1216
>For Christians, the person of Christ
>For Nietzsche, the Übermensch
Each worldview makes its own bet on what niche man should aspirationally try to fill. Point being it's never just some actually existing self, nor can it be computed rationally from what one already is. It's a leap of faith on the hypothesized reality of a higher purpose that you and your posterity can be the best at.

I am neither an orthodox Christian nor an orthodox Nietzschean, so I have a great deal of uncertainty about what kind of beings man (ie me and my friends) could successfully become, or what parts of our current nature we should be attached to.

Tying it back to the OP, the vision that suggests itself to me is a new kind of polis, with classical man hybridized with computerized communication and governance mechanisms, with the best virtues of each. This is downstream somewhat of the idealized person of the philosopher, who I don't yet know how to define.

>>1217
> a new kind of polis, with classical man hybridized with computerized communication and governance mechanisms

I would like to rephrase that as classical man living in a new kind of polis that uses computerized communication and governance mechanisms.