On the tails of the What disruption actually means piece I received a lot of quite pointed questions and rather excited entreaties to apply the theory to the point of everyone's interest. Fine, I shall try.

Note however that most of these have been covered in dedicated articles over the years, and this summary does not replace or supersede their wording. It's just a summary, the originals still control. Also, and related, any omission here does not constitute a promise of absence in the future - if I give you a summary account of a horse that omits to mention its hooves and you build something that depends on the horse not having hooves... you're stuck. So for these reasons, should you proceed on the mere summary instead of the actual articles and in so doing arrive at a contradiction later on, it'll be upon you - I disclaim all liability.

I. All internal political arrangements. This has been implied in experimental work such as the voice model for #bitcoin-assets and oft discussed on the channel itself, but nevertheless it is difficult to directly grok its magnitude. It literally means all internal political arrangements : in the bedroom, between men and women, in the courthouse, on the street, in the diner and absolutely anywhere and everywhere.

Expect to see in the future a society arranged much closer to the strictures and principles that yielded the London Apprentice Riots of the 1590s rather than the assorted nonsense which yielded the Los Angeles Riots of 1992.

It is up to you whether you wish to process this in the emotional terms of "ohmaigerd, three centuries of so-called progressive progress down the drain" or in the rational terms of "finally, all that gunk gone, good riddance!". It is not up to you however to influence whether this happens or not, and the sooner you come to terms with the fundamentally fraudulent nature of so-called "progressivism" the easier a time you'll have with the future. It is, in proper terms, adaptive.

II. All external political arrangements. Bitcoin is a sovereign, in the great tradition of the Most Serene Venetian Republic. The United States is not a sovereign. Not anymore. Nor is any single European nation, nor their bankrupt economico-political superstructure. Nor is any other nation. China is not sovereign, Russia is not sovereign, nor Malta. Bitcoin, and Bitcoin alone is sovereign. The implications of this, of course, are so far reaching as to be readily left as an exercise to the reader.

Whether you do that exericse or not doesn't matter, however : time will, you can just peek into the box later and jot them down, same credit.

III. All business arrangements. Contracts, as such, are dead. Conceptually dead. Courts, as flowing from that, are conceptually dead as well (they're practically dead because of I and II above, but anyway). An entire history of business ? Gone. This is covered in that celebrated GPG contracts piece, I won't insist.

"Banks" or "the banking system" are a minor knot downstream of this point, and that is if we're talking about "major" considerations, such as "may there even exist a FED", or "may there even exist a MPEx-unapproved SEC". Stuff like AML/KYC is not even on the table, minor knots of a minor knot of a two foot tall sagebrush too drowned in forest acreage to matter, they'll go out without even being specifically engaged, like the various gnats, afids and whatnot you throw out unknowingly whenever you throw out your garbage.

IV. Art. Yes, it goes all the way. As discussed in What is art, art merely exists as the manifestation of the power of the sovereign. The fact that Bitcoin became one just at the time everyone else lost the status practically means that every single piece you thought was valuable became worthless, and worthless items are now valuable. They're all objectively just as worthless, of course, but that is entirely besides the point : the lordship lists enacts art, and unless you're on that list, or a client of someone on that list you're not holding on to a piece of art, but to a piece of garbage.

Yes, you might be able to negotiate a place for historical artefacts in there, but learn from the failure of the "venture capitalists" : you must submit, humbly, abjectly, right now. If you delay, your garbage can go in a bin just as special as the one holding Andreessen Horowitz' "business" paper.

V. Culture. Yes, that's right : outright human culture. This is probably the least comprehensible and most painful bit of the whole show, so let's ease into it by following a recent conversation :

Adlai trinque, mircea_popescu, have you had a look yet at bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=411974.0 ? (at worst, this would just save some money)

Promechard: Proprietary Metablock Chains for Arbitrary Data ... ( bit.ly/1zeOEfP )

mircea_popescu I'm no sure what this is supposed to be ? Adlai How to do deeds efficiently.

mircea_popescu Mno. It's not how to do deeds efficiently, it's how to include people you don't know. I am not interested. Adlai That's not what it is, maybe you should read the actual paper?

mircea_popescu Papers of unknown authors have a chance of being read ~0%. Especially if said authors are alive. Let them get in the WoT. Adlai Here's a shorter explanation of the technique: mathgate.info/promechard.php

mircea_popescu Somehow we're not communicating. At issue is the proposition that ideas are worth anything, and somehow people can ride on the value of their ideas. This is false. People can only ride on the value of their reputation, and "ideas" are not only worthless, but outright meaningless. I simply don't care what some derps not in the WoT think they have to say. Adlai Who said anything about people riding? I'm not talking about people, I'm talking solely about the idea. If you want some reputation to associate with the idea, shoot the messenger. mircea_popescu I am not. I am never talking about any idea. Unless it starts with "here's what X said", I'm ignoring it.

This, obviously, is far reaching. It dovetails neatly into the earlier discussion about the proper treatment of pseudoscience :

One should simply ignore the whole matter wholesale, and then allow the proponents to either introduce their ideas de novo, in the original manner such is handled, or otherwise work themselves dry of spittle and wither away. This flat, unyielding ignorance-as-the-forerunner-of-oblivion is both perfectly safe and exactly the adequate pill for the poison in dicussion, because it expends very little productive effort on the part of the productive members of society, while at the same time forcing upon the unproductive the exact Gordian knot they've been trying to talk their way around (and plenty, no doubt, hoped they had succeeded). That knot is of course practice, which is to say : if I were to declare I am ignoring "all that Einstein jazz", all physics penned after 1900 or so, and then built a cathodic tube television that worked just fine without accounting for quantum effects, the trashing and bashing of Einstein fans would be all in vain : I'll just shrug my shoulders, keep building and selling my television sets and care not on whit of whatever they may write. Eventually they'll run out of ink, because unlike the productive system of making things, the grant seeking system relies on outside inputs to function. While it's true that most objects produced and consumed in a sufficiently advanced society are ideal objects, and while it's true that most people in a socialist/welfarist society are patent idiots (who have no use for ideal objects, and so could be made to value any list of ideal objects in any arbitrary order, just like the primitive minds of the original red skins could be convinced to value the fruits of industry pretty much randomly, and in any case divorcedly from their actual market value), it still doesn't stand that the producers of worthless drivel may create a system where they may thrive that's also stable.

Yes, this does mean that a lot will have to be rebuilt. It does also mean that a whole lot of books have just been burned. One shouldn't be too concerned with this matter : Paris exists as a fabled city strictly because it went through this procedure in the skilled hands of Haussmann.

So yes, we're rewriting gnupg. And a lot of other things. This isn't a bad thing, however : no matter how poorly done, the rewrite can't possibly suck as horribly as the original. The past century has produced the majority of written works in history, but also the vast majority of maculature. There's no saving it.

VI. Everything else. Consider :

mircea_popescu "Among purists, the trickery has inspired an identity crisis and cut to the heart of American auto legend. " Heh. Look, it's dying, what do you want from it. Cars are pretty fucking stupid. They had an economic niche which made us forget temporarily, but it's closed up.

pete_dushenski The fake car noises are because the cars are so well insulated now. And the engines are all turbo because "fuel-efficiency" mircea_popescu But the "identity crisis" is not because of the change in car noise. It's because in the change in the future prospects of the whole activity. Merely disguises itself as "because X", like a domestic argument. In fact, it's becasue there's going to be a divorce.

pete_dushenski You're right, the identity crisis is that of Americans as a whole.

asciilifeform See the advantages: you can reprogram the faux vroom speaker for horse whinny. mircea_popescu Well that's one thing, but specifically as to the car, this entire car-and-zoning-laws-and-sprawl-and-commute model got killed by the internet. THAT's disruption.And it's killed and dead and not coming back and everyone and everything will change to get rid of cars, and of the sprawl. And of commutes and of the right of "governments" to decide land use.

ben_vulpes US road infrastructure is falling apart due to expense of maintenance. Last generation's boondoggle. mircea_popescu Understand : no mistress is ever poor because "of expense". She's poor because she sucks at sucking cock. It's only expensive because we're really done with them. Otherwise, they'd be a "great investment".

pete_dushenski Cheap gas might give it a few more minutes of breath. mircea_popescu Notrly, because it's not really about the gas. it's about the inconvenience. People don't want to spend an hour driving, they want to spend that hour derping on a dating app. (Not for fucking, mind you. So give them a work at home job where no woman can ever come and a way to score nude tumblrs and that's the new economic model.)

pete_dushenski Which would be why average joe can't wait to get a self-driving car.

ben_vulpes Weren't they a grand investment for that generation? mircea_popescu Yeah, they were, back when the interstates were built. That's perhaps the shiniest example of "govt investment in slump" mantra. When it's fucking clear what to spen the money on, so clear even a govt could figure it out, keynesianism works. Had Bush spent ALL the stimulus on making Internet connections of 1tbps universally available, I wouldn't be here snubbing my nose at Horowitz.

pete_dushenski Same thing we're seeing in China at the moment. They've used more concrete in the past 3 years than USA in the past century. All for the interstates and highways and byways. mircea_popescu Yeah. Bad call.

pete_dushenski "But it worked for USA"

decimation The problem with a fancy interstate is that it costs a shitton of $$$ for upkeep. And of course it is politically impossible to admit 'we are too poor to have nice roads'.

pete_dushenski Impossible sums of money. mircea_popescu I never heard of anyone complain that their 16yo cocksucker costs money to upkeep. Complaints start after the 30th birthday.

decimation "But, when you sum these things up in terms of what consumers spend in terms of getting to work, various pleasure trips and non-work trips, and then you look at what shippers spend on shipping freight and so on and so forth, and then what the government spends building infrastructure, we're talking shares of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) that approach the amount that we are spending on health care. ... And that's just out of pocket expenditures. " mircea_popescu All of that used to not matter when one considered on the other side the even greater expenses of the available alternatives. But that other side has evaporated.

decimation 'Other side' being more or less 'private' transport and land use planning? mircea_popescu No. "Working at home" , "jacking off to porn and looking at sights on pinterest". Work and pleasure. solved, and much safer than actually going there. "It's certainly uncontaminated by any cheese", to quote Cleese.

decimation MMORPGs and other like games probably 'employ' much 'excess' capacity in the US. mircea_popescu We meet IRL once a year, and even that's extravagant for like half the people. Yet we meet here each day. What if we had to physically drive to Vegas, like Kennedy HAD TO in the 50s ? We would, of course. So "what the driveway cost" would not be a topic of conversation, because Kennedy is not about to not fuck pairs of starlets on accounts of idiotic considerations like that. Who here is on an economy Internet package ? Everyone just "give me the fattest pipe you got" and "oh only that ? INTRODUCE LARGER ONES!" asciilifeform Lol, yeah, see recent thread where 'what's a gb optic terminal cost plz'.

mircea_popescu Well you should have seen town meetings in the 60s. "FIFTY LANES WE MUST HAS! EACH WAY!" asciilifeform Laugh if you must, but my town still has these same meetings. The road never actually gets expanded, of course. but there is endless derp on the subject, for so long as I've lived here (~11 years)

mircea_popescu Yeah well you're in the sticks.

Everything else. Literally.

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