Lincoln Cannon

Singletons — centralized powers — are the greatest threat to the future of humanity. You think hacking of U.S. telecommunications by China is bad now? Next time it may be a superintelligent A.I. And it will use everything it knows to manipulate, control, and enslave you.

Think the U.S. Government will save us? Not in its current form. Giving the executive branch more power to fight back only makes matters worse. And it almost certainly won’t willingly give up power. In its current form, it’s the world’s juiciest target for superintelligence.

The solution is the opposite of a singleton arms race. The solution is more and greater formal decentralization of power. This isn’t a call for anarchy. And it’s not a fantasy of libertopia. Formal decentralization retains rule of law, while spreading authority.

Formal decentralization already exists in separation of powers between the three main branches of the U.S. Government. It already exists in separation of powers between federal and state governance. It’s not a new idea. But it’s still only getting started.

New and greater expressions of decentralized governance are possible. They could more robustly protect us from internal abuses of power and assaults from external singletons. But we have work to do.

The extent of decentralized power we now enjoy required supporting technologies, such as the printing press and eventually radio and television. Without them, we could not have scaled decentralization as we have. Greater decentralization will also require new technologies.

Fortunately, we have already been experimenting with new decentralized technologies since the dawn of the Internet. Probably the most notable example is blockchain, which has resulted in countless experiments in decentralized governance.

Some people ridicule blockchain, disparaging it as nothing more than gambling, scams, and money laundering. They’re right that all the problems exist. But they’re deeply incorrect to stop their assessment with those observations.

Despite the darkness, despite persistent attempts to undermine and destroy, blockchain has also produced a paradigm shift in finance that facilitates and expedites worldwide transactions. And it’s beginning to do the same in other areas, such as communications and law.

Blockchain has created real value in a Wild West context. It has learned to survive without and often despite centralized authorities. It has done so out of necessity. And it has become the world’s greatest experiment in decentralization of power.

Here we are on the eve of superintelligence. Singletons will surely rise to unprecedented power. Our security and privacy, our agency, is at risk like never before. But we may have the tools we need to protect ourselves, if we continue to choose formal decentralization.

The bright side of blockchain isn’t merely new investment opportunities. The bright side is potential for utterly necessary new forms of governance. I don’t know what the specific details will prove to be. But, to the best of my knowledge, nothing else is more promising.

Addressing Some Concerns

Some are concerned about the development of excessively techno-centric communities. This concern is always relative. Our distant ancestors, if they could see us, would probably consider almost all of us, including the more technophobic among us, to be excessively techno-centric. But there’s an extent to which this concern is also always worth keeping in mind.

Please don’t understand me to be advocating for the dominance of anything like “crypto communities.” I’m interested in communities that have crypto features rather than crypto communities. Technology must serve us, not consume or enslave us.

Some are concerned about memecoins and spambots. I agree that crypto has many challenges, and plenty of substantial ethical failures throughout its history. But, in a sober sense, these risks can and should be perceived as features.

No experiment in decentralized governance will ever work without navigating the extremes of humanity. And blockchain is providing a timely opportunity to do so in a relatively virtual space before AI upends everything around us. Keep in mind that memes on centralized networks are already quite bad. And, because of the centralized powers behind them, they’re far more dangerous.

Some observe that the portability and composability of personal data could solve a lot of problems with centralization. That’s true. However, no individual can solve this problem alone or even separately in large numbers. The networks through which we must operate can gaslight us, no matter how independent we perceive ourselves to be.

There’s an age-old question about whether individuals or communities are more important. Even the chicken or egg question is an example of this, where eggs are a communal artifact. In my opinion, the answer is that they are equally important.

Some understand decentralization to imply a passive libertarianism. And they observe that such libertarianism has tended to cultivate bad actors who exploit the system. But exploitation isn’t a sign of failed formal decentralization. It’s a sign of failed passive governance or anarchy.

Formal decentralization is not a passive libertarianism. Rather, it might be characterized as an advanced form of active liberalism, in the classical sense – not the degenerate “liberalism” of authoritarian progressives. While passive libertarianism is an absence or marginalization of law, formal decentralization is a perpetuation or even exaltation of law in a new paradigm. Formal decentralization must ultimately include formal decentralized regulation.

It’s worth considering the nature of liberty. Liberty isn’t what’s left when others leave you alone. Liberty is something that we create together to empower each other actively. This might also be characterized as left libertarianism or libertarian socialism.

Throughout most of history, interest in formal decentralized governance has been mostly impractical at scale. But that’s now changing, with help from widespread experimentation in the blockchain industry. The printing press didn’t empower democratic republics in a single day. Opportunity is ahead.