(2017-06-09) Rao The Cyberpaleo Ethic And The Spirit Of Postcapitalism

Venkatesh Rao: The Cyberpaleo Ethic and the Spirit of Post-Capitalism

Industrial work makes survival a highly predictable matter, unlike say in hunting or foraging. One unit of work buys you one unit of continued survival.

The cost is that the connection between what you do and why you do it is no longer innate. You need an ideological theory of how the world works to make that connection.

When the outcome of work involves the variability of the environment in a consequential way, meaning and necessity are coupled. Life can be interesting without ideology.

Under such conditions, work keeps you both alive, and interested in remaining alive.

Necessity relates to the capacity for staying alive. Meaning relates to the interestingness of doing so.

We can only learn, stay interested, and manufacture meaning, if the same actions do not always have the same results (within the limits of our ability to discriminate events at all of course).

the variability inherent in foraging or hunting is obvious to human brains because we evolved to be sensitive to that variability and interact with it in a life-or-death way.

it seems that an element of necessity is necessary for things to be interesting; mere variability in environmental responses to actions is not enough.

Necessity is what turns distinctions into differences, and allows us to care enough about variation to make it interesting enough to survive for.

Work-life balance is not about actually integrating meaning and necessity, or Interestingness and survivability. That is fundamentally not possible within the industrial order.

It's about not letting either survivability debt or interestingness debt accumulate to the point that you either die from inability to continue living, or kill yourself because you've lost the will to live.

But with the addition of computers to the mix, true re-integration of necessity and meaning is starting to become possible in small ways for all.

We are reinventing work to reflect the deeper cognitive structure of paleolithic environments of evolutionary adaptatedness (EEA). This is deeper than "gamification."

But we are also re-imagining work to have the post-capitalist macroeconomic structure made possible by software eating the world and creating various kinds of abundance.

I call this the cyberpaleo human condition. It integrates the postscarcity economic logic of computation with the psychological structure of human play-that-works

The Post-Industrial age is hyperterraforming the industrialized earth to make psychological survival easier, by using digital technologies to reintegrate meaning and necessity.

This is why the idea of a Leisure society is ill-posed. It extrapolates the industrial age work/play divide into a human condition where life itself is one big hobby

Because necessity is necessary for meaning, humans never cash out material surpluses to make necessity 100% unnecessary. We always find a way to stake our life on things

I call this the Cyberpaleo Ethic: all the conveniences of the cyber age, with all the life-and-death meaningfulness of the paleolithic age -- engineered by choice into the environment.

In the past, I've written about "great works" and what the phrase means. This is what it means: play that works, and is both meaningful and necessary, making it interesting to survive

The idea of the cyberpaleo ethic is to create a new environment of evolutionary adaptation, for our technologically extended selves

How do you do this? There are no general answers. To create a great work that embodies the cyberpaleo ethic and the spirit of postcapitalism is an individual challenge.

The fundamental drive of this process is to use abundance to create necessity out of the unnecessary in order to create meaningfulness, even at the expense of some survivability

Pure cyberutopia would be deadly to our paleo brains. If necessity becomes unnecessary, we lose the will to live. We'll find ways to turn universal basic income into life/death gambles.