Barbarians of the Blockchain - Podcast Audio Edition

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Hi, I'm @edumurphy. While I'm no longer new on Steemit, I most certainly am new to dsound. Seeing as I don't sing, this experimental first attempt is a spoken word podcast version of one of my oldest posts that ahem ahem didn't suck ahem, a speculative non-fiction look at an unusual application of blockchain and cryptocurrency. It was inspired by a brief conversation with a fellow Steemian named @oddnugget (which I will quote from in a few seconds before I actually begin the podcast proper) He even wrote a fictional accompaniment to it that I will link to at the end of this podcast ... well, more accurately, it's written below at the bottom of the transcript version (which you are might be reading now hahaha)

This audio version of "Barbarians of the Blockchain" has been edited for length, clarity and a slight change to the title. I hope you like it!

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@oddnugget: The bushmen ought to create their own nomadic society and cryptocurrency. Yes, it's a crazy idea, but imagine what they could do. They could be a roaming clan of assassins or traders - maybe similar to gypsies and have their own international currency trade going on.


@edumurphy: That's a deeply cyberpunk notion you just put out there; very appealing fictional vision!


@oddnugget: Someone just needs to teach them to use computers.


@edumurphy: Heh. While funny, that's not insurmountable.

BARBARIANS OF THE BLOCKCHAIN

The previous quotes are from a brief but inspiring conversation between @oddnugget and myself on one of @gavvet's posts. He, that is, @oddnugget, ended up turning it into a brief but deeply evocative work of fiction.

In any case, it got me thinking.

One of the things blockchains enable is cryptocurrency. Together, the two in turn enable groups to smooth the process of being rewarded for what they do by merging the reward for building reputation with the reputation itself. If you are reading this, you are on Steemit and therefore already grasp exactly how this works.

But what if the group in question is a bunch of hunter-gatherer throwbacks to the time before guns, before farms, before steel, before stone — before walls?

If you find yourself possessed of a great deal of time, Venkatesh Rao's "Return of the Barbarian" over on Ribbonfarm.com is a wonderful fascinating piece of work. Really, you could say the same of anything with his name on it ... but let's not digress too far.

So. Rao's "Barbarian." Read it two years ago and was inadvertently reminded of it by @oddnugget. In this essay, Rao gave a sort of speculative history (based on an oldass book by some dude called Veblen) about the three types of human grouping that existed in the past (point being that they still do, just in differing proportions from back then):

savages i.e. hunter-gatherers
barbarians i.e. pastoral nomads and
civilized i.e. people who live in cities

Anyway, the money-shot was that the savages are ultimately irrelevant to history as anything other than predecessors, that the pastoral nomad barbarians are stronger, sharper and smarter than the civilized — BUT the civilized are better at taking the cumulative entirety of their best ideas and putting them into systems.

However, lest you think I am here to hagiographize Rao, I will point out that in that article, he never actually stated just how the barbarians were going to make their grand comeback in today's world (the most cursory look at which would answer the question of which human grouping won the contest - by whatever standard you care to define winning. And in case you're wondering -- yes, the civilized won. That's us) Also, I will point out that he rather underrates the hunter-gatherers who after all are basically barbarians with even less baggage.

At the moment, the Kalahari bushmen (or the San, our hunter-gatherer "savages") survive as fragile isolated remnants, tourist attractions and, in their literal best case scenario that doesn't involve completely giving up their culture and skillset, gamekeepers and bush guides in game reserves. In all cases, they have been crushed into marginal states by the death trap of modern civilization.

The walls, by any objective measure, closed in.

Alright. Back to the original inspiration for all this. @oddnugget's notion, however William-Gibson-meets-Gods-Must-Be-Crazy as it may seem, isn't as implausible as it looks at first glance.

The Kalahari bushman had or rather has an incredible set of skills, both physical and mental. What he doesn't have is a way to use those skills and live that life in today's world from a position of anything other than utter submission to a machine so incomprehensibly vast that just the edges of it are like the curvature of the earth to the naked eye. The workings within it that drive it and push it into what used to be his territory? Hahahaaha, fuhgeddaboutit; might as well be a Lovecraft protagonist trying to count Cthulhu's tentacles.

So. All hope is lost then? Well, not yet. Our savage heroes are about to answer what Rao's barbarians didn't: how to operate effectively and with personal agency in the present day even as it shades into the worst nightmares of cyberpunk authors.

The answer lies with three things. We already mentioned the blockchain and the cryptocurrency that comes with it. We already mentioned that, just as Steemit rewards the blogger for doing blogger things, a currency could be envisioned that rewards the hunter-gatherer for doing hunter-gatherer things.

Several obvious questions arise from this, the most obvious being that Steemit requires a solid base of computer literacy, to say nothing of literal literacy. Our hunter-gatherers have neither of those and by definition cannot gain them without ceasing to exist. In short, dude can't read, how he gonna run a Huntcoin wallet?

To answer that, I will refer you to an experiment conducted in India a few years ago by a fella named Sugata Mitra. In the "Hole in the Wall" experiment, he embedded a computer terminal hooked up to the web in an outside wall facing a slum just to see what would happen. To his surprise, random street urchins were the first ones there. Didn't take the kids long at all for them to find their way online and start tooling around. Didn't take long after that for them to find MS Paint and the Disney channel website.

These kids, as far as I can tell, were not only illiterate, they didn't speak English anyway.

So that's one.

Second obstacle is them having the literacy to run a coin wallet. For that, I have a somewhat more theoretical concept, that I first encountered from the late great Mac Tonnies back in the early 00s. He coined the term "eglyphics" which are basically the not-so-distant descendants of what we currently call emoji, a pictographic language for the post-literate world of holograms and touchscreens that we are already transitioning into.

Now, add to that the stuff scientists, strategic forecasters and deep time planners are trying to accomplish at nuclear waste dump sites by creating hazard signs that humans ten thousand years from now will be able to read and, for all intents and purposes, understand. i.e. Stay the HELL away from THIS mountain or DIE HORRIBLY.

People talk a lot about "Oh, X is going to disrupt Y" nowadays like that actually means something. Haha. Well, put the above two paragraphs together and guess what, you just disrupted written language. Forever. Hurray.

That's two.

As for the third question i.e. hardware — well, the construction and extractive industries (and of course the military) already make extensive use of ruggedized laptops and tablets. A ruggedized wearable touchscreen, perhaps arm-mounted (like the Yautja alien from the Predator movie), loaded with an eglyphic interface isn't too hard to imagine.

@oddnugget's vision is starting to look kinda plausible now, isn't it.

Don't know about the assassin part (that can stay in the science fiction version of this article, perhaps a plot by some decentralized James Bond Villain who likes having a cadre of African Wilderness Ninja at her beck and call) but the trader thing could totally work. In either case, our civilizationally-traumatized half-extinct throwbacks just took a jump from penury to participation.

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Well, alright! That wasn't so bad. Thus ends my first podcast on the blockchain. If you liked it, feel free to upvote, comment, resteem (or is it resound lol) If you didn't, feel free to do all of those things TWICE (and then complain about it in the comments and we'll debate said merits and demerits until nothing makes sense anymore lol)

If donation is what strikes your fancy, I have several crypto wallets to choose from. You can't see me but I just swung my hand like that lady on "The Price is Right."

Steem/SBD: @edumurphy

LTC: LLeapGkFjT8BNb2JcwunXG3HVVWLY7SaJS

Dash: XdCpkRRxejck5tfXumUQKSVeWK8KwJ7YQn

Doge: DNwUsAegdqULTArRdQ8n9mkoKLgs7HWCSX

ETH: 0x09fd9fb88f9e524fbc95c12bb612a934f3a37ada

BTC (if you really really have to): 1L9foNHqbAbFvmBzfKc5Ut7tBGTqWHgrbi

Thanks so much and till next time, I am @edumurphy. See you on the blockchain!

@edumurphy

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