Note: I do my best to keep interfluidity noncommercial, but this post is kind of an ad. I also hold “Ether” as a speculative asset, so the post could be interpreted as talking my book. I am sorry about all that. I hope you find this interesting anyway.

A bit pathetically, much of what I have been doing for the past two years is working on a software project called sbt-ethereum.

When I began, I thought it’d be a few months’ work, and would enable me to do what I’d hoped to do, which is publish little economic experiments or toys in a way that many interfluidity readers could, if they wished, try out and interact with. Unfortunately, my software philosophy is “go slow and make things, and oh fuck I’m running out of money”, and that’s exactly what I’ve done.

Nevertheless, I am quite devoted to my little project, and hope that perhaps some of you will be interested. It scratches lots of my personal itches.

First off, there is Ethereum itself, which captivated me a few years ago as a potential space for institutional experimentation. Technological change has, thus far, been utterly eviscerative of civil society. In theory, we should all be able to communicate and coordinate so much more easily than before, this should be a wonderful golden age for community, cooperation, and coordinated action. In practice, quite the opposite has occurred. By removing the frictions that protected various localisms, we made a world so flat and seamless that mega-institutions, the kind that like to move fast and break things and make a lot of money, could easily dominate and have done so. Our lives and hopes are attention plankton in the baleen of the whale, and even while we are drawn into the suction, we know in our plankton hearts that it is killing us. What we need now is not an ever more open, ever more endless ocean of connection, but defensible reefs upon which durable human communities can deposit themselves and give themselves form. We need to be able to create barriers, to create stakes that render our attention committed and less susceptible to footloose “engagement”, we need to design structures and rules that regulate and sustain those communities, and mechanisms to enforce them.

Ethereum (along with perhaps its many imitators and successors) is a weird, deeply imperfect technology, but it could be a playground (or petrie dish) for this kind of thing. It lets one define, in software, relationships between events that can be human interactions and flows of economic value. Human community transcends money if it is worthy of the name at all, but relationships embedded in flows of economic value usually form the bones and sinew on which the softer flesh of human intercourse grows. Families, for example, are not “about the money”, but they are among other things arrangements that pool economic resources and arrange flows to individuals who do not directly receive flows from the bigger, wider world. Extended families grow weaker as resource pooling beyond nuclear family boundaries becomes less common, a phenomenon for which (like most social phenomena) causal arrows go both ways. Communities and resources are related and interdependent. A “community” materialized only as a Facebook group will always be a weak and shallow thing. Tools like Ethereum, at least in etheory, could enable people to define economic institutions conducive to durable and effective communities, at scales as small as families or as large as social movements, and to administer them in ways that are transparent if not always fair.

But this project (which I describe as “intentional community” in perhaps ill-augered homage to an earlier movement to carve out local spaces), requires a tremendous amount of experimentation, at small scales. It should be easy and cheap to try things out. So far, understandably but to my disappointment, actually existing Ethereum development has been focused on millions-of-dollar start-up scales rather than hundreds-of-dollar group-arts-budget scale. There were the ICOs that, for a moment, could raise infinite money from a buzzword; the “fat protocols” that venture capitalists use to seduce themselves and their not always lovely worldviews into the space; and now we have the “DeFi” (“decentralized finance”) vision. Flows of economic value do shape, form, and deform human communities. So far the scent of big money fast has largely structured the Ethereum community, not for better but for worse in my view, though I am grateful for my own speculative gains and for the (not unrelated) continuing vitality of the space.

sbt-ethereum, this software I’ve been working on, is designed to encourage very bare-bones Ethereum projects. Someone, by definition a coder, has to write the “smart contracts” — the Ethereum programs that coordinate interaction and value. But once such a smart contract exists, sbt-ethereum “repositories” should be usable, and potentially modifiable and customizable, by a much broader range of technically comfortable users.

sbt-ethereum emphatically is not a GUI, web, or mobile app. It is, on the contrary, text-based software that defines its own, fairly weird but hopefully accessible, command line. One reason, in my view, why institutional experimentation with Ethereum has been both slow and unproductive is a premature fetish for “Web3 dApps“, which often strive to be as close as possible to the current generation of web/mobile applications that both serve and oppress us, except backed by “communities” defined by smart contracts rather than the narrow interests of some ordinary firm. Building a beautiful website is an expensive, high-overhead activity, and for all of that work, the peculiarities of interacting with Ethereum, which is quite different from the database-and-payments-provider back-end of your ordinary Uber, can’t help but poke out uncomfortably. sbt-ethereum encourages users to explore and interact directly with smart contracts from its internal command line. A smart contract alone is sufficient to be a usable application, a workable experiment. Just deploy it and play, no JavaScript, or Swift, or even HTML necessary or desired. sbt-ethereum‘s main usability tool is the <tab> key.

sbt-ethereum is not intended for the mythical mass end-user. It is intended for the people who invented the personal computer, and then invented the modern internet, and then disappeared. It is intended for hobbyists. And also for researchers. If you are an economics professor, or an economics student, it is intended for you. Make game theory less theoretical. Invent some games and play them amongst yourselves with real money. Iterate on them, publish them for others to play with. Describe and theorize what you see.

sbt-ethereum is, to me, also about human agency. I am an old curmudgeon, so perhaps it is just that. But I view the current generation of computing as dystopian. I hate my mobile apps, even as I am dependent and addicted to them. When the web first came to be, a prominent feature was “View Source”. Users were invited to look at a web page and understand how it was made, so that you could make your own. Just prior to the emergence of the web was the desktop publishing revolution, which let anyone with a computer produce publications of a quality that only recently before would have required professional typesetters. I remember during heady quasi-Marxey college conversations gushing about how now we owned the means of production in the form of our spiffy Macintoshes. Computing now feels utterly infantilizing. You can publish anything you want, as interchangeable content, fodder for vast machines built by Jack and Mark, control over which becomes theirs. Beyond “social media”, publishing has re-professionalized, and professionals are in the business of exclusion and difference, of profiting from what others cannot do.

My software, like this blog, is a throwback. I sometimes joke that sbt-ethereum is “Ethereum for the 1970s”. Its UI would be basic on a green-screen terminal. But the software that sits beneath the nostalgic phosphorous is powerful. Professional quality, I hope.

But I do not write it for professionals. I write it for amateurs. It is free software. I hope that you will give it a try. For most readers, I suspect this talk of smart contracts and institutional experiments will sound abstract and vague, hard to make sense of. I hope I’ll publish some little toys, the kind of ideas that got me started on this in the first place, sometime soon.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 26th, 2019 at 10:33 am PDT.
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