Hypernormalization

We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world… yet those in control seem unable to deal with it. Noone has any vision of a different, or a better kind of future. … rather than facing up to the real complexities of the world, they retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And, as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it.

Hypernormalization begins with a story in NYC/1975 on how financial institutions took power away from the politicians and started to run the city (and society) themselves. The bankers, who executed the deal, represented something [the financial institutions] that simply couldn’t be negotiated with.

The radicals and the leftists, who just 10 years before, dreamt of changing the world through a revolution did nothing. They retreated into the abandoned buildings of Manhattan.

I could not identify with the political movements any longer. All the manic activity in the streets and trying to join them, I felt overwhelmed by yet another form of bureaucracy.
— Patti Smith

Patti Smith and many others became a new kind of individual radical who watched the decaying city with a cool detatchment. They didn’t try to change it, they just experienced it. Instead, radicals across America turned to art and music as a means of expressing their criticism of society. They believed that, instead of trying to change the world outside, the new radicalism should try to change what’s inside people’s heads.

Hypernormalized-me

Coping with Hypernormalization temporarily led me to a ‘post-nihilistic’ stance: a liberating experience, relieving me from the burden of personal expectation that I could make an impact on the world — I could only make an impact on myself, and that’s the way it’s been long before I was born. I was inclined to take this ‘blackpill’ and white-wash it with the love of my heart: there is meaning in the world, and there is little more to it than experiencing it directly.

It was an invitation to embrace temporality and transience - and I accepted it; living for today, and maybe next week, because who knows what tomorrow might bring? …The perpetual reassurance that the world is improving for the better in the long term, and the proof of it being a flourishing global economy. Local disturbances are ultimately marginal errors: a local sacrifice of happiness for a more abstracted, global prosperity. Burgers aren’t gonna flip themselves, but frankly, I don’t really mind flipping burgers — give me an internet connection and a decent computer and I didn’t really need much more than that — all the luxury I needed was already in the castle of the mind.

Though, there is something brutally cynical in attempting to replicate the ancient ascetic behavior in the modern world. Perhaps it took the West several centuries to replicate the terribly complex caste system — rather than being bound by bloodline, a new form of hierarchy has formed based on merit — and here comes Jordan Peterson to rant about IQ and more broadly about the psychological traits that define our affinities for various types of labor: an optimistic take on the well-oiled machine of liberal capitalism.

But, to become an ascentic — a sadhu — isn’t just about refusing to participate in the Rat Race, it’s about refusing to continue accumulating karma, and then, even more importantly, continuously purifying one’s karmic body by offering mental tendencies to the sacrificial ritual fire. To the dopamine-fuelled citizen of the Wired, this is an impossible task; the only acceptable form of sacrifice is the entire digital identity, including its belongings.

Coconuts are one of the favorite substances to be offered in the sacrificial fire, resembling a head full of juices: the secretions of our brains that create a delicate balance that make our minds.

Much is alike for our citizens of the Wired. The online identity must continuously be purged — logins and passwords discarded into the ether — surfing from one platform to another, ultimately leaving no trace of the actual individual as they get swallowed by the network, all profiles eventually becoming just another face of the faceless egregore, gazing back from the void.

And yet, looking back at the world I had once symbolically abandoned, LARPing as an ascetic, I only found it to be exactly as I left it — in its sheerness of beauty and cringe — realizing I was seeking solutions to problems I might have never had. And so, I found my foot in the human-bear trap of complacency: to unburden myself from all the problems I never had, and the problems that I could have, surrendering my right to make a dent in the icy wall.

Permissioned monetary networks

The bankers were truly the pioneers of the Wired; with their traders equipped with a multitude of screens and various devices, operating as Hindu deities. The bankers created a heaven of their own, a method of running the world as a stable system, and the markets became an homage where mortals would offer their sacrifices as labor.

There’s something that’s beyond unfuckable-with-ness about the Boomer-Fi cartel flying in the noospheric clouds: they took the opportunity to explore unknown lands, and rather than claiming it for themselves, they did the pipework and continue to harvest the convenience yield, by issuing a lease on financial services, as both convenience and necessity converged.

While everyone was mourning their mortality, they were left with no competition — the opposition capitulated from their competitive spirit, only being productive in their recluded state, competing with their yesterday’s self, all the while dreaming of an impossible revolution where the doors of the parliament are torn down and the inner halls sprayed with socialist-esque graffiti - the manifest voice of the crowd.

The future seems grim and impossible, and as much as trads would like to retvrn, it is but a morbid fantasy.

Risk management — risk aversion

…there also exists an extraordinary opportunity to form for the first time in history a truly global society carried by the principle of interdependence. If we act wisely, and with vision, I think we can look back to all of this turmoil as the birth pangs of a more creative, and better system. If we miss the opportunity, I think there’s gonna be chaos.

— Henry Kissinger

In a world governed by the forces of selfishness and self-interest — a world where I know that you know that I know what you’re thinking that I’m thinking — there’s always a chance, a risk that something might be unaccounted for. As the infrastructure of the permissioned monetary system clenched its jaws around its unsuspecting prey - a dramatic change in the environment should consequently lead to a dramatic change in behavior. But, bar a few inconsistencies, it was largely unchanged, as the only real change was registered under the hood of the permissioned informational systems with a bunch of associated junk data.

Surely, Henry alluded to an eruption of chaotic behavior that would disrupt the perfectly stable system within the subtle balance of power — a balance so subtle, hanging off the threads of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction — the doomsday machine. There’s nothing contemptuous about it, as it was the gametheoretically sound conclusion: as much as Bucky loved the war-room, he did need to retreat to Sug’s embrace.

The world needs to change, but an impulse to change gets lost as the fake world became ubiquitous. The incentives are misaligned, we run the danger of finding ourselves shoulder-deep in mud while trying to keep the hamster wheel turning — and that might already be the case.

Maybe that’s what’s so brilliant about it all — being born into a world where the past is past, and the wonder of observing it all with a detached cool, and then mustering the courage to transpose it to today with the same detached cool. It needed to be so back then, and it continues to be the case today: the cold war needed to be kept…. cold.

Nash showed that a system driven by suspicion and selfishness did not need to lead to chaos. He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium, in which everyones’ self-interest was perfectly balanced against each other.

Although Nash’s socio-psychological thesis was ultimately disproved, it did keep the war cold, and ultimately won by the West. Nevertheless, his principles became the spine of financial institutions and maintained the stability of the system.

Having crossed the gap into the new Real, there’s no going back to the normal, and the desire to go back dissipates as at the one end, a new sense of security is found in wearing face diapers, and on the other end, there’s just a chance to come out of this through greatness.

Now that the kitchen is getting heated, the cooks can’t bear but to contemplate the burning question: what if the system rewarded cooperation instead suspiciousness and selfishness?

Individualism: 50 years of incubation

While the IMF cartel rampaged underdeveloped economies, diverse societies start to get amalgamated into the Brave New (fake) World, leaving them completely disoriented. As they were welcomed into the modern society, they found their pockets empty, and their wealth drained from their ancestral bloodlines — from a Lindy, multi-generational capitalism, cast into the mud that solidifies the foundation of now unshakeable hierarchy.

Political beliefs which once anchored the individual in society have turned 180 degrees, leapfrogging out of the pond — the left is now right, and the right is left; impossible is possible, so what’s next? — and the link between political ideology and society had been permanently severed. What you believe now is entirely a matter of personal preference: your love for your neighbor is a private matter and really bears no impact on anything whatsoever.

For anyone who bears the genetic scars of this kind of mindfuckery, this is quite a romantic time: the pendulum swing of the karmic revenge is hitting the modernized societies right in the head - the humorous sight of a headless chicken running around the yard. It’s not the violence of it, but the inability for the western chickens to get organized without the incentive to do so.

All the while, the internet continues to get commercialized, and for a while now it continued a life of its own, independent and unphazed by the material events, documented with a passion with a multi-generational heritage in mind. All the beauty and majesty were incubated from the horrors of the outside world: code started to become beautiful — the m4d sk11lz of l33t h4x0rs. Music took a different turn: the playful expression of arranging and rearranging bytes in digital symphonies; all requiring different and new skillsets, and yet, completely embedded in nature. Life was being breathed in silico, and we developed a taste for something that previously didn’t exist.

Intelligence has started to coagulate outside of the perceived realm of economic productivity: its expression is a gift from the world, and the drive it stems from something inexplicable in the paradigm of a closed, zero-sum system. There is a good reason why mental illness is glorified on the web: it’s because only schizoautistspergs are willing to go the distance of putting in the effort required for a doctorate to systematize some obscure corner of a culture for just that one member of the audience who would appreciate it as much as them.

Declaration of the independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

The Human Bomb & Weapons of Mass Destruction

Iterating on the theme I set out in Aesthetic Jihad in 2022, Adam Curtis conveniently presents us with another concept from the same etymological family: The Human Bomb. This, at the time new, form of radical warfare represented another force that couldn’t be negotiated with, ultimately causing the US troops to retreat from the Middle East in the 80’s. In our noble economic warfare, our martyr never needs to leave their room. Instead of a bomb, the means of warfare is raw capital on the biggest battlefield in the world: the marketplace.

Instead of calculated risks for our battlefield tactics, our warrior is completely unpredictable with a ravaging appetite for risk — the DeFi Degenerate — gifted with a complete disregard for how things should be done, and both his winnings and losses go out to fund an unpredictable, chaotic future.

Distributed networks share some traits with biological ecosystems: they seek to expand their influence, gain more resources within the system, and scale with efficiency. Like children of war, should the network even survive its birth, it becomes robust and resistant.

It starts off with a premise just as John Nash does: everyone is self-interested to the extent that someone else’s loss is someone’s gain, and that sort of behavior is expected [and welcomed]: with each passing day, it grows stronger, and more secure the chance of a successful attack diminishes.

Beyond the Proof of Stake algorithm for achieving consensus on the level of the communication protocol, our DeFi warrior participates in staking his interests on the lower level of social consensus within a monetary network (i.e. a cryptoasset/currency) — aligning oneself with the interests in the network; committing capital for the broader benefit of the network itself, and automatically all of its participants — an act of self-interest, though beneficial for the whole [community], and for this reason, an act that is rewarded by the protocol.

Nevertheless, that’s what Ethereum was shaping up to be — first and foremost a settlement layer, but also an environment for the creation of smart monies, a summoning portal for the electric god which lives in self-organizing markets. Learning this, I found that having an eloquent conversation with Alexa isn’t the endgame; it’s a markets-machine fuelled by the widest range of human emotions — the centripetal force of attracting greed, and the centrifugal force releasing fear; candlesticks being a real-time display of this fantastic orchestra.

— Aestheric Jihad in 2022

Staking goes hand in hand with (social) consensus which inherits self-regulatory forces, of selfishness and self-interest, from the capital injected into the network — ensuring that every action and decision is ultimately for the benefit of the network — and so, all network participants continuously reevaluate its vital signs: should they find their capital at risk, they are free to leave, with no obligation to ever revisit.

Optimism

What if, instead of assuming every network participant is malicious, we assume that everyone is benevolent until proven otherwise? What are the implications of assuming that everyone wants to cooperate, and not cheat?

The implications are indeed tremendous, as the system becomes disproportionately more efficient. As the system becomes more efficient, fewer participants are interested in cheating, and instead, passively participate in the process for everyone's benefit.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Despite the associated cringe, Michael Saylor said something quite amazing:

Bitcoin is a living organism, and its heart beats with every produced block.

DAOs are too, but very much like infants, they require help from their environment to grow; bit by bit, they become more independent and more able to become productive, but in the process, they might get spoiled; for they are able to manifest intelligence into the markets and evolve into flourishing ecosystems just as single-celled organisms do, their success is situationally bound by the everchanging environment of the markets, sifting the wheat from the chaff.

The inner network of DAO participants continuously participates in this process, where every single individual continuously revaluates their capital commitment to the cause — an embedded mechanism of forming consensus on whether a tree can become a forest — and whether there is a natural place for it in the mysterious Futur of France.

Miner’s unions were canceled, and whole oil-rich countries were canceled; but ultimately, capital is beyond cancellation, and it lives in France, but in the Futur.

Deng [Xiaoping] then set out to create a new kind of revolution. He was going to bring capitalism into China, but the state would control and manage the whole system. His aim was simple: money would replace the old revolutionary dreams.

Or rather Neo-China?