Proof of work politics

Words are cheap, Elons are scarce.

If you combine collective utilitarianism (Mohism) with the network state idea of Balaji Srinivasan you get network utilitarianism. The topology of networks is very different from geospatial topology. There is an asymmetry in distance - you can be close to someone, but they are not close to you - for example you follow someone closely on X/Twitter, but they are not following you and are not aware of you.

Or imagine a huge island suddenly popping from the ocean or disappearing under the surface next to an island where you live - as a metaphor of a new social network like TikTok or Instagram suddenly appearing, or MySpace disappearing next to Facebook.

Balaji Srinivasan redefines a nation as a densely connected subgraph in a social network. Social networks have borders that are opaque to the administrators and users, even though they can be mathematically defined as users that spend exactly 50% of their time on two social networks. But since the competing social networks don’t have a database of users and data about usage from their competitors they can’t find out where the border is exactly.

This is connected to a broader phenomenon I call dark growth. For example BRICS countries are operating increasingly outside Western banking for fear of sanctions and this keeps the West in the dark about their transactions and trade.

This opaqueness manifests itself also on the microlevel of a user generated content - social networks were pushed by the blue institutions to shadow-ban users to prevent the Streisand effect. And these users don’t know also if they aren’t outside the Overton window that keeps changing constantly, as do the dictionary definitions of terms that were once stable.

Moreover, society keeps splitting into myriads of memetic tribes based on global trending topics that turn into scissor statements - for example people on the Left and Right got split on the Gaza conflict after October 7 2023.

Interestingly, we saw sparks of the opposite movement through what I call grand glue gestures as the opposite of scissor statements. When in August 2024, Donald Trump got up and shouted: “Fight, fight, fight!”, after he got shot during a rally in Pennsylvania, and when RFK Jr. endorsed Trump, we saw instant endorsements from parts of the counter-elites in Silicon Valley. A kind of ASAP Asabiyya driven by a free X/Twitter that created a preference cascade, to use Timur Kuran’s term.

The post-war international order might have ended on 5th November 2024 with Donald Trump’s reelection. Suddenly his 45th presidency in the US wasn’t a random fluke but a harbinger of things to come, and Biden's presidency appears as a remnant of the previous regime. I called it the Velvet Revolution 2.0, but interestingly there were no people tearing the Berlin Wall. Twitter was liberated two years prior, in 2022.

Network utilitarianism focuses on maximizing the skills, health and wealth of the network, as opposed to a geographic entity. It goes beyond the tribe, city or empire.

Besides geopolitics and biopolitics, we get a focus on noopolitics. Interestingly enough, effective noopolitics isn’t conducted by statements and speech, but by proof of work - by grand gestures that become the glue that glues various memetic tribes of single issue voters together. Words are cheap and create scissor statements that split communities in half. But “catching rockets with chopsticks” or showing courage after being shot during a rally is hard to fake and replicate.

Proof of work is a useful concept from the cryptocurrency world that serves as a guarantee of digital scarcity. If politics is the sublimation of violence, alignment is the sublimation of politics. Jason Lowery in his book Softwar sees bitcoin as a global power projection tool through powergrids.

Luke Gromen sees the “bitcoin is the new oil” narrative, and a similar recent statement from Donald Trump, as a repeat of inflating the role of oil after the 1973 oil shock. Producers of oil were recycling their earnings into US Treasuries. The rising price of bitcoin is boosting the market share of stablecoins, and these in turn raises the demand for US Treasuries. It’s a WAGMI world for bitcoin, crypto, gold and the dollar.

WAGMI stands for “We all gonna make it” and it has one caveat - we are transitioning into a proof-of-work politics as an orthogonal axis that unites and permeates geo-, bio- and noopolitics. Words are cheap, Elons are scarce. Dollar will win if there are dozens of Elons, Palmers and companies like SpaceX and Anduril.

“Truth, Health, Wealth” is the new “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, says Balaji Srinivasan. In practical terms this means improving learning, burning (of calories) and earning skills of a community. We need new media that are non-entropic and focused on “work instead of heat”.

Seeing 20 random posts with random links of memes from all around the world and just being immersed in the current thing is the current form of media that produces entropic heat, like particles going in all directions. A non-entropic media is focused on upleveling members of a tribe in specific directions - like learning, burning calories and earning crypto.

This requires new non-entropic social media that focus on crypto tasking and are able to extend the attention span and agency of large numbers of highly-aligned people both online and offline. Gregory Rawlins in his book The Human Swarm describes the concept of a metaconcert - where millions of people can temporarily collaborate online together.

Balaji Srinivasan says that destruction is orders of magnitude easier than construction and one reason is that destruction is much easier to do in parallel (like throwing bricks at windows by many people), but to construct something requires planning, division of labor and project management.

Curtis Yarvin writes about an “automated voting” app, where people follow the advice of a leader via an app and show up to do bloc voting and are thus able to influence politics effectively. This partly maps to Balaji’s idea of a network union. From a world where everyone is online we imagine a world where everyone (within a startup society or a network union) is aligned and does a daily proof of work time of activities or donates money instead.

Technodemocracy is also a related Balaji’s concept where you don’t just upvote people on social media from all around the world - but you are also able to sign a smart social contract with politicians and institutions - your vote and netizen fees are based on keeping promises by the politician to act as they pledged during their election campaign.

We can view Balaji Srinivasan’s technodemocracy as a proof-of-work politics that changes geopolitics, biopolitics and noopolitics. Words are cheap, Elons are scarce. China is currently winning the hard power game because they can build factories and infrastructure. But Elon is winning the smart power game and therefore China respects him.

We move from fiat politics and fiat science into crypto politics, and the disintermediated citizen journalism, citizen science and longevity/bio-hacking research - supported by crypto instruments and funded by crypto.

Network utilitarianism differs from individual and collective utilitarianisms in a focus on dynamic utility stemming from relations, long-term adaptability, health and resilience of the network. And proof of work is what protects the network.