What people don't get about blockchain, or The revolution won't be on Shark Tank

in blockchain •  7 years ago  (edited)

Everyone is missing the point.

Mainstream criticism of blockchain tends to flow from the following categories of objection:

1. I don't understand it and nobody can explain it to me as an elevator pitch for a product, therefore it can't be good because I am smart and know how to smell bullshit products.

I call this one the 'consumer retail pitch' fallacy, and it comes from people wanting to put themselves in the mind of a consumer or investor and think 'would I buy this or not'? In other words, they want to be the panel on shark tank, carefully sizing up the cost/benefit ratio to their current mode of life and make an incremental decision on whether or not this purchase will create a gain in that life. This misses the point. Rather than a high-gloss finished product to consume and critique, blockchain is a part of a broader push towards a new way of thinking and organizing social interaction. Specifically, to organize organization itself away from hierarchies and centralized chokepoints in order to liberate human interaction from top-down control.

This brings me to standard objection number two:

2. Blockchain is really just a 'background' technology' and as such is more like the new Linux in terms of its potential rather than a 'new internet'.

The implication of this argument is that blockchain beyond the hype and froth is really just a glorified workhorse, by further implication meaning that just as Linux did not visibly affect most people's lives directly in any way, neither will blockchain technology. Not only does this show a staggering lack of imagination, I would submit that the real implication here is less akin to finding a new workhorse and more similar to the change that happened to human organization with the domestication of animals. The domestication of animals was a key factor in building efficient agrarian societies and the new social verticals of human organization that this sedentary life brought with it. What we are seeing now with the blockchain are the first glimpses of the exact opposite, new social organization away from these verticals due to digital decentralized technology. In both cases, a new technology (which just means a way of doing things) radically altered the basis for social organization which in turn radically altered the long term trajectories of human societies. Don't think digital technology has this power? Long term, I submit that it has.

Fine, some objectors might say, but people are still douchebags and centralized control is there for a reason. This brings me to standard objection number three, that unless you have centralized control all 'free' systems go to hell due to bad behaviour:

3. The decentralization of blockchain may mean that nobody controls the information, but that also means vulnerability to malign or nuisance inputs that cannot be curated away by anyone.

This is the classic 'people need to be controlled argument', as old as time. Mature blockchain will be big on matters of trust and identity, you can trust me on that. Once you accept that most of your high-value interactions and transactions on blockchain driven systems will be done with very good identity verification, you also realize that reputational damage and consequences for interaction potential will be equally real. The most hardcore of techno-anarchists may get nervous here, because who ultimately provides this identity? The State? Not necessarily, but in the crossover period of creating trusted identity applications for blockchain systems it's hard to imagine a complete schism between blockchain and state forms of identification if we are talking societal level mass adoption. In the long run, however, the matter of identity and assigning identity will completely transform social life as we know it today, because it will shift societies from state assigned and controlled identity power and legitimacy towards decentralized creation and upholding of it. Before then the quickest 'hack' is probably to simply transfer state verified means of identity onto trust applications that allow us to better run the blockchain. In fact, this area is in many ways the flashpoint of interest right now because it signifies the interaction point between the accepted identity markers of 'old society' and a new digital one.

These objections are fun to discuss as such, but my ending argument here is that all of this is really missing the point. I submit to you that the real value in criticisms of blockchain is in seeing how they generally betray a statist, centralized bias that 95% of people carry around with them as they make their way and seek to be successful in what they perceive to be (and what often currently is constructed as) a centrally and arboretically organized world (i.e. based on vertical thinking such as top-down and/or bottom-up models of growth).

People who 'get' and are most excited about blockchain, in contrast, are generally those with a more decentralized psychology, meaning their social interaction framework is one of horizontals, horizons, liquid assemblages, and movement as opposed to the centralized psychology of depth, height, cores, supremacy, vertical distribution, linearity, and the never-ending search for static and 'clean' patches of unspoiled abundance on which to build equally static machines of mining that stretch ever deeper and higher from those fixed points. Whether or not blockchain will be the ultimate and final technology to create and drive this change in mindset matters less than the increasing momentum towards this style of thinking and organizing.

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photo credit: Businessinsider.com

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