In 2014 Lawrence Lessig asked the Mayday PAC to help him fix ‘money in politics.’ At one point during the crowdfunded campaign, when it looked like it would not meet its goal, I asked myself the following question:
‘If we can’t fix money in politics, can we fix money?’
The exploration of this question led to my formulation of the democratic hypercapitalism framework, this site, and a speculative manuscript that I called ‘Art and Democratic Hypercapitalism.’ The initial feedback that I received led to a couple of issues:
Someone suggested that what I was really talking about was catallaxy and not capitalism so the name changed from hypercapitalism to hypercatallaxy.
People kept asking why I wanted to do something like this. What was the deep why that the what of hypercatallaxy answered. This led me to go back to the drawing board and answer this question.
The result of the second question put the entire venture into dormancy while I pursued some other business opportunities and spent my spare time trying to answer the question of ‘Why?’
I finally have my answer and it is available today in my book Immortality. The subtitle of the book is ‘An Economics and Moral Framework Toward Immortality.’ It is a study of the intersection of the moral quandary that our postmodern world finds itself in and the vast potential of the results of current scientific inquiry.
It turns out that the answer to why we need to change the kind of money we use is because it is good and right to do so. By doing so now, we can speed the oncoming reality of much longer lives. It may be too late for us to participate in this reality, but it may not be too late for our grandchildren. I try to pitch a vision of the future that is highly anti-fragile to the volatility that we face as a human race and propose a moral framework, a form of money, and a political structure to support this vision. The book mixes and extrapolates a number of ideas from Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence), Christopher Alexander(A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order), Nassim Taleb (Anti-Fragile and Fooled by Randomness), and Eliezer Yudkowsky(Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and Rationality: AI to Zombies).
The book can be purchased in physical form on Amazon here.
On kindle here(free for Kindle Unlimited Users).
And on the web here.
You can comment and ask questions on github here.
And you can view the source and history of the book on github here.
If you find something interesting and would like to help further the research please consider supporting my Patreon here.
My hope is to build out a set of smart contracts that implement the ideas in the book, publish a set of ongoing blog posts, and a podcast series where I explore these ideas with others in the community.
I take pull requests, so if you have some suggestions or corrections, please fork and submit pull requests.