On page 306 of Scale, Geoffrey West discusses Dunbar’s Law and its implication for human social networks. To summarize this law: it claims that humans have multiple levels of bonding strength. At the lowest level a human will have around five connections of the strongest type of friendship and intimacy. Typically this would include some members of one’s family or a best friend. At the next level there are around fifteen connections that are not as strong as the first level, but are still firm. This would include close friends you might talk to on a daily or weekly basis. At the next level there are about fifty connections… and so on… The numbers of connections scales by tripling the connections at each higher level. In the book the levels are labeled as: 1) Kin, 2) Super-family 3) Clan, 4) Tribe, and 5) Strangers.

When I first read this in Scale, I was immediately reminded of David Graeber’s anthropological work regarding economic relationships among humans. In his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber observes on page 99-100 that baseline communism (sharing) follows a similar structure. Thus, using the terminology from above: At the kin level Graeber notes that there is much sharing between members and the relationship is baseline communism. Thus, you can extend this and map these economic relationships with those of Dunbar’s Law: 1) Kin (~5 people) : Almost all sharing with very little debt or IOU, 2) Super-family (~15 people) : IOU with a good amount of sharing, 3) Clan (~ 50 people) : Mostly IOU and little sharing, and 4) Tribe (~150 people) : Almost entirely IOU with very little sharing. Anything outside the tribe would be exchange via a cash medium except in rare occasions, such as a child falling in front of an on-coming vehicle (a person would naturally share his strength to save the child’s life). Although I may not have followed Graeber’s observations exactly I find this train of thought to be interesting as it requires one to rethink the concept of currency, exchange, and economic relationships. Indeed, Graeber’s book challenges the entire paradigm of the historical development of currency and debt by analyzing the anthropological record.

There are other options, but not what I have in mind: goTenna, FireChat, etc…

Autocosmocracy – a form of society in which the political relations between its members, without the aide of any hierarchical institution, continually gives rise to a self-organized society. A continuously existing society without a higher power structure; a system where authority lies in the absolute freedom of the individual. All members are autonomous agents.

The world of the biologist is filled with organisms which are self-organized. In the natural sciences there are numerous phenomena in which order arises out of agents acting autonomously. Is not man himself a biological creature in the physical world?

Imagine a hypothetical situation where the form of civilization is an autocosmocracy — all individuals completely autonomous, bound by no institution. I would postulate that inevitably, after a certain number of generations, the civilization would form groups due to scarcity; and that these distinct groups will form their own government. These new groups will throw away the autocosmocratic forms and create novel political frameworks in order to achieve various goals. For instance, there is great dominating strength in having a mass of brutish men who will obey all commands unquestioningly. In other words, in an initial state of complete freedom and liberty, humans will group and band together. It can be shown mathematically that this will be the equilibrium state. Those individuals who fail to join a group will be out competed or destroyed by those who do join a group.

A similar situation occurs in the distributed cryptocurrency mining networks. This system, which is initially distributed with all individual miners acting autonomously, inevitably transforms into a network of groups due to competition and scarcity. So the natural question arises: how to prevent the formation of such groups in the presence of scarcity? Or is it a better question to ask how to eliminate scarcity?

In terms of Plato’s cave of shadows, it would be a society in which all members are able to discover the source of the shadows. All members would exist as philosopher kings.

Update (06-12-2016):

Sia – Will someone develop a MySQL version to run a database that exists on Sia? I imagine hosting a WordPress site on IPFS, and the database for the site will be on Sia, I think that is a correct way to view the future of WordPress…?

Steem

IPFSDroid – IPFS for Android, eventually I imagine it will support a full node on a cell phone!

Update (05-11-2016):

AKASHA PROJECT

IPFS:

InterPlanetary File System and IPFS Blog

Juan Batiz-Benet slide deck

Ethereum:

Ethereum and Ethereum Blog

Developing Dapps

Synereo:

Synereo and Synereo Blog

Others:

Follow My Vote

Kim Dotcom’s MegaNet (link and status pending…)

Videos:

Juan Batiz-Benet at DEVCON1:

Ethereum for Dummies – Dr. Gavin Wood at DEVCON1:

MegaNet Kim Dotcom on RT:

The solution, not without its own disadvantages, would be to create and migrate all users to a decentralized social media network. I think this would be possible with Namecoin in combination with WordPress (think BuddyPress) where all users would have their own local servers or rent machines with services like Heroku, Namecheap, Openshift, Amazon EC2, etc.. The process should be simple:

1. User rents machine on Heroku, Namecheap, Openshift, etc…
2. Install WordPress on this machine
3. Add WordPress social network plugin
4. Create Namecoin domain
5. Create user profile
6. Publish posts, socialize and message friends

Here are some current examples/ideas of people creating and implementing P2P social networks:

Diaspora – Working version of a private decentralized social network

Synereo; visit their blog to keep up with their progress.

The Pandora. P2P Social Network

Vole: Peer-to-peer social web

Masques: an invisible social network

Samsara Social Network

Kálmán Graffi

Student’s brilliant idea: A peer-to-peer social network

PeerSoN: Privacy-Preserving P2P Social Networks

… the non-coding sequences have certain statistical features in common with natural and artificial languages. Specifically, we adapt to DNA the Zipf approach to analyzing linguistic texts. These statistical properties of non-coding sequences support the possibility that non-coding regions of DNA may carry biological information.

With that quote in mind, consider that Francis Crick suggested in 1975 that life on Earth could have been the result of “Directed Panspermia.”

Also, check out Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge for Jeremy Narby’s thoughts on this subject.

Messages in DNA? Directed Panspermia? Great ideas for a science fiction movie, yes! But unless scientists find evidence that life definitely arose on Earth through natural processes, then these ideas can and should be considered legitimate hypotheses — they both can be refuted by evidence showing that they are false.

Let’s entertain the rather wild possibility that the information contained in these non-coding regions may in fact be information encoded in the DNA by an advanced “thing” which purposely sent life to Earth. This would suggest the question: “At what level of development did cells and bacteria arrive on Earth?” Fully developed with DNA, ribosomes, and protein synthesis? Or, perhaps just DNA contained in a capsule?

If an advanced intelligence wanted to send a message to be received by an organism which eventually developed enough ability to discover this message, how would it do this? What would the message be? What would be the context of the message?

Would it be possible to encode a message as “form” in matter. By form, I mean something like studying the processes and relationships of molecular biology, for instance see: The Molecular Basis of Life. The incredible form of the DNA transcription; the fascinating ability of the kinesin protein to travel microtubules; could these forms and relationships be the message? If the context is biological travel in space, might these cellular forms and relationships be teaching us how to expand and develop in space?

But a message based on form seems to be invalid because it is the non-coding regions of DNA which are not expressed in protein structures that contain the statistical properties of Zipf. However, I think we still have much to learn about DNA and its interactions with the rest of the cell which may change the way we view DNA. It just seems hard for me to understand how 1,000,000 specially crafted objects (proteins) of various shapes thrown in a zero gravity room together could somehow bounce and collide to eventually create an organized dynamic transport mechanism across that same room — not to mention the dozens of other cellular processes. So, where does the form of cellular processes arise?

These thoughts came as I was watching 3D animations of kinesin protein travel along microtubules. Perhaps we could design a sort of kinesin vehicle which would travel along a microtubule connection from the Earth to Moon? Or, they could serve as connections between asteroid space bases suspended in the Lagrangian points. No need for rocket fuel, it would be similar to magnetic trains. What would it imply if an idea for space travel and transport could be found inside the cell?

Most “activist” investors and funds are simply trying to change corporate boards for self-interest, their goal being to induce a new executive team to increase profitability, free cash flow, product diversity, etc… Most likely the purpose of these activists is to make changes which will result in a large long term gain with a nice 15% tax rate. But, what I am suggesting has no goal other than to raise enough funds to accumulate an ownership stake which will allow a board take-over of a large corporation.

One of the interesting aspects of this fund would be that it’s goal would not be in any way to earn investors a profit. Thus, all contributions to join the partnership would be subject to complete loss. Any gains or losses would be given back or incurred to the donors after the mandate has been achieved. Once the mandate is complete, the partnership would be dissolved. This could take 1 year or 10 years depending on the situation in the corporation.

Starting anew would ensure that any managers would not be corrupted. Fees would be minimal. No one managing this fund would make any more than a living wage. However, there will be legal and other such fees which are unavoidable.

For instance, if 10 million people invested $3,000 in this partnership, the total of $30 billion would be sufficient to slowly accumulate a controlling interest in the corporation. Once the controlling interest is achieved, the board of directors would be replace by the desired men and women. This new board would then replace the executive team to create a new culture for the corporation to ensure the mandate is achieved.

Anyway, let me know what you think… constantly trying to think of ways to improve/fix our existing system.

Perhaps they don’t realize that most developed economies, including the United States, Europe and Japan are in dis-integrative secular cycles. Any global fighting will only accelerate the descent into local unrest and civil dissidence in the developed economies. It is important to remember that World World II began around ten years after the start of the Great Depression. The current global depression, yes depression (not recession), occurred about seven years ago. History does progress in cycles, not necessarily at periodic intervals, but the highest probability of global war is in the years following a global depression. Martin Armstrong has mentioned that November 20, 2014 was a critical date in his war cycle and that 2015 and 2016 are going to be volatile years.

Looking at The Bubble Index (10,080 and 20,160 days), shows that the DJIA and S&P 500 are both still in large scale decompression phases which started in 2008-9. Similar decompression phases in The Bubble Index occurred in the late 1960’s and lasted through the 1970’s. This marked a time of great civil unrest. And if you are an Elliott Wave follower, Daneric’s blog suggests the recent bull market is a “sucker’s rally” B wave off the 2009 lows, and that a C wave is about to unfold in the Wilshire 5000 (although there are other EW blogs, such as Caldaro, which predict different outcomes). If these predictions come true we are looking at a future in the next few years of political unrest and economic volatility. Only time will tell…