(2017-10-10) Pearson The Blockchain Man

Taylor Pearson: The Blockchain Man

The term Organization Man is a rich one. From it, we can conjure up an image and a life.

Today, the successor of the Organization Man — the Blockchain Man — is starting to emerge. To understand how he might evolve, let us first look back.

Whyte saw the central values in American life shift away from the rugged individualism that had characterized the nation since its founding, towards a collectivist ethic that Whyte called the Social Ethic.

In the view of the Organization Man: “Man exists as a unit of society. Of himself, he is isolated, meaningless; only as he collaborates with others does he become worthwhile, for by sublimating himself in the group, he helps produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.” This was a novel state of affairs.

The logic behind the rise of the Organization Man was simple. Participating in the global economy lead to a huge quality of life increase. Doing so was only possible through large organizations. (BigWorld)

The Anatomy of our Blockchain Future

In Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez suggests we’ve gone through three major techno-economic paradigms since the rise of capitalism.

The Sovereign Individual, a 1997 book allegedly read by Satoshi Nakamoto, forecast that it would be a new technology of money, not communication, that would decentralize and disintermediate the structure of society in the way many originally hoped the internet would

*In the mid-2000’s, it became economically feasible to run a ten-person company manufacturing in China, distributing in North America with developers in Eastern Europe and designers in South East Asia.

Over the next two decades, blockchains will bring transaction costs down yet another order of magnitude. It will enable as yet unconceived of business models*

As we approach a world without transaction costs, the equilibrium size of the corporation trends towards one person. That person is The Blockchain Man

The Organization gave man access to the benefits of globalization but required conformity. Blockchains give the same access but do not insist on the same conformity

The Balkanization of Everything: City States are The New Nation States

The Hollywood Model is the New Career Ladder

The Blockchain Man’s career will look like a combination of a lifestyle business owner and free agent

This will result in a career for The Blockchain Man alternating between project sprints and periods of unemployment or mini-retirements, much like Hollywood operates today.

Teams of Blockchain Men will come together to work on complex projects in the same way as in Hollywood, but coordination will be improved via tokenization. (Virtual Company)

Instead of a paycheck, The Blockchain Man’s income will be a large number of micropayments from past projects

Being shoved out of the corporation into a Hollywood-like free agent land, the Blockchain Man will be exposed to a broader calculus of his decisions and tradeoffs.

To take one example, most Organization Men do not see the tradeoffs and costs of how they save for retirement

The Organization Man saves for his retirement in his 401k because his company is matching it. He rarely considers other ways to invest or spend that money.

Forking, Voice and Exit

In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Richard Hofstadter argued that a culture of mass entrepreneurship underlay the American Revolution. Small business owners — blacksmiths, printing shops, and carpenters — formed a culture incompatible with monarchy.

In much the same way, the sense of agency the Blockchain Man feels in his personal life will form a culture incompatible with The Organization as it exists today.

To fork a Blockchain is not free either. It requires sufficient scale in terms of users, miners, and broader tooling (wallets, exchanges, etc.).

Probabilism is the New Determinism

much of what is now opaque and made to appear deterministic will become transparent and shown to be probabilistic.

In his best expression, the Blockchain Man will resist reductionism and develop an ability to move between conceptual systems as the needs change, just as he moves between different blockchains depending on his needs. At his worst, he will descend into protocolism.

Protocolism is the New Nationalism

Each blockchain protocol will have its own maximalists (the blockchain equivalent of supremacists) who believe that it is the One, True Chain.

The Selfish Coin

*What happens when you mash blockchains, Uber and Self-driving cars together? The self-owning car.

A car that pays for its lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. It is a corporation.*

Smart refrigerators will likewise create a highly liquid, ongoing market for groceries, buying and bidding on groceries based on user settings and their current contents.

The Organization served as a shield from markets. In the worst cases this created rent-seeking bureaucracies. In the best cases, it served as a humanizing intermediary.

The blockchains which survive will be the ones which have the greatest fitness for their environment, not the ones which make The Blockchain Man feel happy or fulfilled

The Protocol Ethic

*three tenets of the Protocol Ethic.

• a belief in the individual as the source of creativity
• a belief in serving the needs of the protocol as the ultimate purpose of the individual
• and a belief in the application of blockchains to achieve an individual’s highest potential.*