Free World Theory

Chapter Three

Free World Theory

Chapter Three

by Chas Holloway

3.1 

“We’re Here to Help”

If you were an alien looking at earth, coming back and visiting every few hundred years to check on progress, you wouldn’t be interested in the names of kings or wars, or who won this or that election. You would simply note that as long as long as earth’s technology was low, its leaders could not threaten the existence of life on the planet.

As long as humans were primitive and social aims were unsophisticated, as long as we were preoccupied with crude goals such as Build the Pyramid, Kill the Heretics, or Burn the Witches, as long as our war technology was limited to shooting flaming arrows, or pouring boiling oil on the castle invaders, or firing lead projectiles powered by chemical combustion, and so on, there was nothing one team could do to another that would wipe out all of humanity.

If you were that alien, you would see earth as an interesting archeological study in savagery.

But if you came back today, during the first half of the 21^st century, you would notice things had changed. You’d see that, although earth had not yet attained civilization, it had reached the final stage of High Barbarism.

You’d see that, although we had developed advanced science, we are not using it to solve social problems. Instead, mega-governments are in a contest to see which nation-state would control the whole planet. You’d see politicians in Nation A using every technology they could to develop more and more powerful weapons before politicians in Nation B do it first.

Now, because you had seen this kind of thing in you your travels through the galaxy before, you’d know we are at a critical point. We are about to either achieve true civilization, or destroy ourselves.

To an alien research anthropologist, this would be fascinating. You’d watch politicians on TV discuss how our missile platforms in space, our slaughter drones, our insect sized exploding quad-rotor swarms, our robots with automated kill instructions, our thermonuclear weapons programs, were necessary to solve national problems. You’d watch as nations used every means available to dominate other nations and enslave their own populations, as well.

By then, you’d probably get depressed — just like we do when we watch too much evening news. What a waste of evolution, you’d think, as you put your spaceship in gear and cruised on, keeping your distance and locking your doors.

Because our alien is looking at earth and our civilization from the outside, he can see what we can’t see.

3.2 

The Third Wave

Author, Alvin Toffler, wrote a seminal book decades ago, called The Third Wave. In it, he says, there have been two great waves of civilization, and we are experiencing a third wave now. Here’s a quote from it:

“Until now the human race has undergone two great waves of change, each one largely obliterating earlier cultures and replacing them with ways of life inconceivable to those who came before. The first wave of change – the agricultural revolution – took thousands of years to play itself out. The second wave – the rise of industrial civilization – took a mere three hundred years. Today history is even more accelerative, and it is likely that the third wave will sweep across history and complete itself within a few decades. We, who happen to share the planet at this explosive moment, will feel the full impact of the third wave in our own lifetimes.

“This new civilization, as it challenges the old, will topple bureaucracies, reduce the role of the nation state, and give rise to semiautonomous economies in a post imperialist world. It requires governments that are simpler, more effective, yet more democratic than any we know today.”

This is a great description of what activist coders, libertarians and freedom-loving people everywhere would like to see. It is also a great description of what Free World Theory explains how to do.

Toffler wrote this in 1980. That was not only before the internet — it was before people had personal computers!

He couldn’t explain back then what the technology of the change would be because it had not been invented yet. He just knew the Information Age was changing the world in a fundamental way. Now, more than 40 years later, we can complete his thesis, for this is the fundamental change that digital technology is bringing to civilization:

The Network Dominant Society.

Societies around the globe are changing from a hierarchical dominant pattern, which began in ancient agrarian times and lasted thousands of years, to this network dominant pattern. This is the way in which digital wave civilization is reshaping everything.

Hierarchically Dominant Society (HDS) is being upended. Network Dominant Society (NDS) is obliterating the systems and institutions that we are all used to. No wonder the world seems so unstable today.

This is not someone’s insidious plan. There are no governments or dark billionaires are behind the scenes, steering this change. It is simply the result of the rise of science and technology and the rise of the Information Age. Everything you thought you knew about your civilization is rapidly, inevitably and irreversibly changing.

• The REASON traditional political systems no longer work,

• The REASON western society seems to be falling apart,

• The REASON blockchain developers want a “Decentralized World,”

…is that the world is transition from HDS to NDS. We are entering an age in which bureaucratic and corporate pyramids are not the dominant feature of the landscape, anymore. The networks are taking control. This is what “The Decentralized World” looks like. This is the world Blockchain Developers want but are unable to describe. This is Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave. And this is where human civilization is going.

Blockchain technology by itself cannot create a decentralized world.  DAOs and dApps would be absorbed by the centralizers just like thousands of other technologies have been. When radio, television, computers, the internet, and the mobile net first appeared, it seemed like unrestrained freedom for all. But now, the centralizers are using all those technologies against you. You might have noticed.

Smart contracts and blockchains would fall to the centralizers in exactly the same way. Except for one thing. There is a new science and technology on the scene that enables us to decentralize social systems, instead. Free World Theory contains all the algorithms needed to avoid hyper-centralization and the collapse of civilization. It explains how to create the Network Dominant Society Age.

Free World Theory is the science of creating and sustaining societies without

the use of centralized coercion. It explains the rules of the emerging networks

that will both decentralize and control civilization simultaneously.

No new physical technology needs to be created to make Free World Theory work. Everything humankind needs to attain freedom and achieve true civilization already exists today. But there is still one big problem. We have to give up on the idea that centralization is the only way to control society.

3.3 

Broken Chains

Decades ago, I was watching late night TV and I happened to see an old Disney documentary about “progress.” Huge tractors were cutting down whole forests to build cities and concrete highways. The voice over was in a style you never hear anymore. “Man, Master of Nature,” the narrator said. “Trees fall like toothpicks. Forests are flattened under man’s mighty hand.” I think the documentary was made in the 1950s.

Most people didn’t know what “ecology” was back then. But then, in 1962, Rachael Carson published a book called Silent Spring, and the word came into public awareness. After that, the idea that we humans are the master of nature collapsed.

Master of Nature was a useful idea during the 1800s, the Manifest Destiny era, when the population was moving across the North American continent and there was still vast wilderness to tame. But now that the wilds are gone, we know we are not masters, but an integral part of the ecosystem. Master of Nature is no longer a defensible idea.

What most people haven’t caught onto yet, is that a President or Congress being “Master of Society” is also an outdated point of view. The system in which one person (or a small group of people) rules society is an obsolete idea. It is rapidly going extinct.

A politician today, acting like Master of Society, passing laws, trying to fix the modern digital world, is anachronistic. It is like a tenth century blacksmith using a hammer and chisel to fix the motherboard in your computer. It can’t be done. It’s the wrong tool for the job. The blacksmith may have good intentions, but when he whacks the logic board with his iron hammer, all that is going to happen is damage to the system.

We have to ask the question: if network control, which Free World Theory advocates, is such a good idea, why hasn’t it been done before? Why didn’t the founders discuss networks during the American revolution?

3.4 

The Etymology of Network

The American founders created a system that took freedom and prosperity to heights the world had never seen before. The American Revolution was astonishingly successful. It enabled capitalism to merge with the Industrial Revolution without interference from a monarchy.  As a result, in 150 years America produced more property that all prior civilizations had in the history of the world, combined.

However, in 1787, before the Industrial Age, before railways, before steamships, before electricity, the American Founders didn’t know what the word network meant. The concept did not exist in their time. The word network first appeared in the English language during the 1500s — to describe fishermen making nets out of rope, and that literal meaning did not change until fifty years after the American Constitution was written.

The first time it was used as a metaphor was in America, in 1839, when the word was used to describe an “interlocking system” of transport, by rivers, canals, roads and railways. The expression “broadcast network” didn’t happen until the 20th century — first, in radio, then in television. The American founders didn’t know that networks are a fundamentally different kind of social organization, distinct from pyramids. They didn’t know there was a way of organizing society other than with a leader at the top. They were glad to get rid of King George, but they were still stuck in the mindset that the only way to organize a society was through a hierarchy.

Here, from our vantage point in the 21^st century, we know that is not true. But the founders didn’t have the advantage of seeing our digital age. The only kind of social organization they could imagine was a centralized government. But they also knew it would lead to trouble. The best they could at the time do was try to balance the power of hierarchies: the judicial, the bicameral legislative, the executive. They hoped it would organize society, but limit government’s power.

The American founders were a rare breed in world history. They did not want unlimited power, like politicians do today. But they also knew that those who do want it would inevitably rise. They tried to limit government, but unfortunately, it didn’t work. As a result, the nation they created is in worse shape today, and has institutionalized more slavery, than they could ever have thought possible.

3.5 

Networks: The First Secret to Freedom

Today, the United States has taxes many times higher than England ever imposed upon the colonists. We have more regulations than our Founders could have ever imagined. We have,

• Centralized SURVEILLANCE

• Centralized BANKING

• Centralized PRESS

• Centralized HEALTH CARE

• A centralized ECONOMY, and more…

Blockchain coders have a name for this. They call it “third party interference.” In other words, an outside party, either a hacker or a government, interferes with the exchange of property between two or more people. They believe DAOs can eliminate third party interference. Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and free market fans are hoping they are right.

Many activist coders claim the real action in society today is not republican vs. democrat, it’s not liberal vs. conservative, it’s not not socialist vs capitalist. It is centralization vs. decentralization.

But…

How do we know that decentralization will really take the world towards freedom? How do we know it won’t take us towards tyranny and slavery, instead?

Big Vision libertarians believe that decentralization is a move towards freedom, but how do they know? How does anybody know?

There is only one way to know for sure. We have to have a scientific definition of freedom. If this so-called freedom-through-decentralization movement is ever going to succeed, the first thing developers — and people in general — need is a genuinely scientific understanding of what freedom is.

So, that what we will discuss in the next two chapters.

END OF CHAPTER THREE