After discussing prayer coin, libido coin, and any other coin I could think of, a friend of mine got me a free ticket to Radical X Change. I got myself a miles ticket to Detroit and I will be crashing on a futon at some hacker house which I will pay for in free geek tee shirts. But I get to go to this awesome conference.

I am so impressed by how the folks at RC are so involved in the conference circuit. This is something I have neglected since grad school. My last conference was like in 2003. I presented on something called “The Robotic Imagination” and Donna Haraway gave a (bananas) keynote on playing agility with her dog. Today I understand it as a brilliant and prescient analysis of non-human persons – otherkin thinking – but back then it was pretty bonkers.

Today, at the RadicalXChange conference, I participated in a session on Social Impact led by Zooko Wilcox. Then, a great breakout session on anarchism and crypto, where I learned about the relationship between body practices (think straight edge) and self-sovereignty and … anarchism. I am getting a reading list from one of theattendees who is a professor of political science.

I also attended a great token prototyping workshop led by RCer Sarah Friend (and two other amazing people). We treated token rules as game core mechanics and then treated token creation as a game design exercise. It was awesome.

My game design group group had a poor showing. It involved reading news you don’t want to read. I want to reframe this idea into a token to expand one’s reality tunnel, in the words of Robert Anton Wilson.  The idea is, I am stuck in my reality tunnel. My reality tunnel is different from, say, the reality tunnel of someone that binge watches fox news.  Perhaps you might not want that reality tunnel, but one way to expand our consciousness, according to RAW ,is to experience other reality tunnels. Also I think this is an empathetic act. So lets dive into the pain.

Imagine a game or a token where the goal is to encourage people to read information that concerns a different reality tunnel, or to enter a different reality tunnel. How do you prove that you actually entered this alternate reality? In the group this afternoon it was suggested that you take a quiz on the content. But another woman mentioned that just repeating the content was enough. MIMESIS. I thought this was a much more interested solution.  To prove you have entered another reality tunnel you just have to repeat it or copy it (NOT VIRALLY: )

What happens if you fail? You get more content in that reality tunnel.

How do you cheat? You cut and paste instead of type.

How do you lose? You do not repeat the reality tunnel content in the allotted time.

How do you win? You accumulate the most reality tunnels (tokens).

But this is on-going. It is a practice. You must constantly test yourself against different reality tunnels. But I digress. I really wanted to talk about an alternate way to provide for programmatic based (ie blockchain) public goods  called quadratic voting.

Quadratic Voting:

This is the paper that everyone is referring when they talk about quadratic voting.  In a nutshell people express how strongly they feel about an issue, rather than for or against an issue.  Like you can support an issue with 3 votes, instead of 1. However these votes cost quadratically more (not linearly more).  The idea is that you will vote and pay the most for the issues that are most important to you.  This is different from say a majority system, or even a representational system.

Its interesting… I am reminded of Rousseau and the idea of the General Will.  This is also a good book/reinterpretation of the General Will.  I always interpreted the General Will as some sort of mathematical representation of the will of the people as a whole. As was not the case in Rousseau’s day, we can actually calculate this now.  Even without the blockchain we can just census data and the power of the state.  The issue now concerns THE MATHEMATICS of the general will. And perhaps it is quadratic voting.