Art, God, Bitcoin, Meme
The secret sauce of network success
“There is no enemy greater than your own mind, but there is no ally greater than your own mind” - The Dhammapada
Self-deception leads to destruction, self-correction leads to transcendence.
Have you every wondered how human beings became the dominant species on the planet? Most people will tell you it’s our ‘big brains’, our ability to speak, or maybe our dexterous hands. What if I told you that is a form of self-deception?
Think about it for a minute. How do you think you would last against a pack of wolves, or a pride of lions? How about a tiger or a bear for that matter? We’ve been on this planet in one form or another for millions of years, and for most of that time we were on the menu.
Homo sapiens have only been around for the last 200’000 years and that almost ended 75’000 years ago due to extreme climate change. Yet from a population of little more than 10’000 adults humanity took over the planet. What happened?
Art and The Network Effect
One clue can be found in cave paintings, it is in fact the paintings themselves. For the first time humans were able to create permanent stories. Stories that could be shared with people that we would never meet. It was the power of stories that enabled humanity to collaborate at scale, and it still is. We are still sharing stories across the planet and working together as a consequence.
The internet is the great modern cave painting.
If you could wind back the clock to the upper palaeolithic, also know as The Great Leap Forward you would find yourself in the middle of a cultural explosion. Our ancestors were developing complex language, music and art, their toolkits became increasingly sophisticated. With the development of art and language came an upgrade in cognitive ability - the metaphor.
Metaphors are powerful shortcuts to instant and memorable understanding. They evoke vivid images and allow us to "see" things from a new perspective, and so are useful tools for creative problem solving.
“Metaphorical cognition is at the heart of both science and art.” - John Vervaeke, Awakening from The Meaning Crisis Episode 2, Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution.
Metaphors are how we make creative connections between ideas. Life is a journey is a simple metaphor with a tonne of meaning. Art and language powered by metaphor extended our capacity to share stories and create shared meaning that transcended tribal affiliation, time, and space.
The great human network begins in earnest.
The Biggest Story of All Time
When I say the biggest story of all time I do not mean Romeo and Juliet. I mean the most powerful and binding narratives in human history, religion. Regardless of whether you are religious, spiritual, agnostic, or atheist (arguably a different type of religion), it cannot be denied that religions are the most powerful stories in our collective history. Even early on, if you’re a hunter-gatherer group that has a shaman you’re going to out-compete the group that doesn’t.
Religion has given us the gift of holding abstract ideas as collectively valuable. A way to translate the later state experiences of mushroom eating shaman into practical guidance to navigate a dangerous world.
Through religion we have found a way to encode transcendental symbolism, to ritualise pathways to enlightenment. Religious art and music are amongst the most beautiful, elevating, and moving forms of human expression. It’s amazing to think that text’s that are thousands of years old are still read everyday. Stories that traverse space and time, connecting humanity into a collaborative network.
Unfortunately where there is light there is shadow, and I am not in denial of the atrocities that have been carried and are being carried out in the name of religion. My point is that metaphors and stories are the secret sauce to humanities dominance because they facilitate collaboration at scale. Complete strangers will literally fight and die with each other because they share a belief in the same metaphorical story. The cats and the bears never stood a chance.
Show Me The Money
The other great story of humanity is money. Money allows us to trade with distant strangers, even enemies. Money teaches us to think in an abstract symbol system. It also teaches us numeracy. Furthermore, money allows us store energy for the future, reinforcing our projection of our self through time. We can work now, store the work/energy as money and then use it for our future selves.
Today, the dominant money, and hence the dominant story, is the US dollar. Despite the obvious flaws of fiat currency, there is no shared story as universally accepted as the dollar. It’s even taken over the story of gold! Did you know 61% of international bank reserves are in USD not gold?
However, the story of USD is beginning to crack, recent decades of corruption, money printing, and financial bailouts are rapidly devaluing everyone’s salaries, savings, and investments. You may have noticed an increase in gambling, of pursuing luxury lifestyles, and a rejection of traditional work values. The current story of money is beginning to show signs of stress and rejection.
Blockchain super-money
If you haven’t heard of blockchain, or you are uncertain of what it is then you might want to read this quick primer.
TL;DR - Blockchain is like a Google spreadsheet shared among thousands of computers in a network. It’s a method of recording information that makes it impossible or difficult for the system to be changed, hacked, or manipulated. Anybody can see the data, but they can’t corrupt it.
Blockchain is the newest human innovation for distributed collaboration at scale, even among enemies. Its no surprise that it was invented for the express purpose of creating a super-money. This super-money is called Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the greatest meme of the 21st century, a still forming story that is challenging for the position of super-money. But I’m not here to tell that story, however, I do want to tell you about the myth behind Bitcoin - Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi’s Hero Journey
Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in 2009. There is no Satoshi Nakamoto. Its a fake name, a pseudonym for the person or people who wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper. All that is know is Satoshi created Bitcoin as an electronic payment system that is based on cryptographic proof, instead of trust.
In doing so, Satoshi was offering to address issues of trust and stability in traditional economic systems by eliminating the need for corporate banks and centralised financial institutions. Thus giving ordinary people a chance to take back financial control of their lives by participating in a decentralized financial system.
Satoshi created something that could,
Disrupt the incumbent power of traditional economic elites
Empower ordinary people by leveraging the network effect
Make Satoshi extremely rich
Satoshi remained active during the first year of mining Bitcoin, until around 2010, but hasn’t been heard from since. Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared leaving a Promethean gift for the masses. Super-money for the people, a new story, a new meme, a mythical creator and no curtain to peak behind. Never to be heard of again Satoshi left a fortune in Bitcoin that remains used.
In case you are wondering Satoshi has about 1.1 million Bitcoin. At today’s price of $70’000 each that is roughly $80 billion, untouched.
“It was the power of stories that enabled humanity to collaborate at scale, and it still is.”
Would Bitcoin be as successful today if Satoshi was a known person or persons? If their motives and allegiances could be called into question? Their social media history on display? No, of course not, the mystery of Satoshi amplifies the meme.
And what a meme it is, a networked super-money built by a myth that empowers people to collaborate at a scale previously unheard of. A meme that can transcend tribal affiliation, time, and space.
I wonder, what’s next for the naked storytelling apes of Earth?
“It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.” - Satoshi Nakamoto
Thank you for a really thought provoking comment Pauline 😊
Religions attempt to connect us to a spiritual reality that is beneath/beyond or the source of what we experience as a material reality. I think atheism attempts to connect us to reality too but based on different assumptions/beliefs as to what constitutes that reality - both are narrative structures that give a framework to abstract meaning from experience.
It's the framework that we build our collaborative behaviour on top of.
As an atheist, I find the concept of religion and its storytelling incomprehensible, as it defies my autistic brain's ability to process or manage it within my cognitive framework. It remains one of life's greatest mysteries, requiring hope and faith to believe, a virtue that is always commendable in various contexts.
I do believe it is one of the most powerful storytelling tools ever, with the power to destory humanity alongside our man-made ecocide.
As I age, I mature more spiritually, valuing my cognition and how it arrives at the ultimate context of what I perceive as right and wrong, aside from religion.
On humanity and us naked apes, Ronald Wright put it brilliantly in his book A Short History of Progress: 'letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while, but in the end, it was a bad idea.”
We are definitely a bunch of naked apes playing with fire and have gotten burned by so much. And there is much more ignition to follow because humanity keeps it all lit.