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The blockchain has gone from cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) to “smart contracts” (Ethereum) and is now beginning to push into the frontier of the ultra-decentralized economy envisioned in Daemon. Thanks to a certain new president, governance is now front and center, and tens of thousands of people around the world, inspired or influenced by Daniel’s ideas, are working on new models that are more inclusive, more deliberative, and harder to capture.
Sebeck watched the unsuspecting citizenry—the tax base on power walks.
In general, Sebeck viewed computers as a necessary fact of modern life. His chief complaint was that they gave a false sense of precision to poor thinking. But then, technology was like religion—you either had the faith or you didn’t.
"Did you know that the percentage of Americans in private prisons has more than doubled since 1993? Private prisons—with their slave labor—are immensely profitable. The largest private prison corporation reported annual revenues for 2005 of one-point-two billion dollars."
"The American private prison industry is now an international enterprise. The two biggest companies have direct construction or alliance partnerships to build prisons in over sixty nations—including countries where criticizing the government is a crime. This ensures an ever-increasing pool of slave labor—"
Leland’s equity offerings used tedious statistical analysis to mask the fact that their business centered on enslaving foreign people and ravaging their lands. They didn’t do this directly, of course, but they hired the people who hired the people who did. Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too—but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to
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the Great Diffusion has begun—an era when the nation state dissolves. Technology will cause this. As countries compete for markets in the global economy, diffusion of high technology will accelerate. It will result in a diffusion of power. And diffusion of power will make countries an ineffective organizing principle.
This was the very essence of capitalism: thriving on chaos. True, there would be a temporary economic meltdown, but like pruning a tree, it would grow back fuller and healthier than before.
"Private industry is your government. I thought you knew that."
"You want to destroy the Daemon—but you offer nothing in its place. How can you expect to handle the future if you can’t even handle the present? I’ll tell you what the Daemon is: the Daemon is a remorseless system for building a distributed civilization. A civilization that perpetually regenerates. One with no central authority.
