A Note on Justin Murphy’s Moldbuggian Social Transparency

The drama of Justin Murphy’s “retard vacation” and the delayed fallout of his necrophilia tweets have dovetailed into a peak-publicity Daily Mail article recently. All that aside, I’m still thinking about the (now somewhat forgotten) fallout of his #WyrdPatchwork talk.

A transcript of the talk has been online at Justin’s blog for a minute now and so I wanted to just cut out the part that seemed to piss everyone off so much — and, I still think, rightly so:

[T]here is one thing that the rich today cannot get their hands on, no matter where they look. And I submit that it’s a highly desirable, highly valuable human resource that most people really, really, really want. And that is genuine respect and admiration, and deep social belonging. Most of the rich today, they know that people have a lot of resentment towards them. Presumably they don’t like the psychological experience of being on the run from national governments and putting their money in Swiss bank accounts. They probably don’t like feeling like criminals who everyone more or less kind of resents and wants to get the money of, or whatever. So my hypothesis here is that if we could engineer a little social system in which they actually felt valued and desired and admired and actually received some respect for their skills and talents that they do have and the work that they do put in… I would argue that if you could guarantee that, that they would get that respect, and the poor would not try to take everything from them. If you could guarantee those things, then the communist patch would actually be preferable to the current status quo for the rich people. My argument is that this would be preferable; it would be a voluntary, preferable choice for the rich, because of this kind of unique, new agreement that the poor and normal people won’t hate them and we’ll actually admire them for what they deserve to be admired for. So then the question becomes, well, how do you guarantee that that’s going to happen? This is where technology comes in.

The poor and normal people can make commitments to a certain type of, let’s call them “good behaviors” or whatever. Then we can basically enforce that through trustless, decentralized systems, namely, of course, blockchain. So what I’m imagining is… Imagine something like the Internet of Things — you know, all of these home devices that we see more and more nowadays that have sensors built in and can passively and easily monitor all types of measures in the environment. Imagine connecting that up to a blockchain, and specifically Smart Contracts, so that basically the patch is being constantly measured, your behavior in the patch is being constantly measured. You might have, say, skin conductance measures on your wrist;  there might be audio speakers recording everyone’s voice at all times. I know that sounds a little authoritarian, but stick with me. Stick with me.

Basically, by deep monitoring of everything using the Internet of Things, what we can do is basically as a group agree on what is a fair measure of, say, a satisfactory level of honesty, for instance. Let’s say the rich people say, “I’ll guarantee you a dignified life by giving you X amount of money each month. You don’t have to do anything for it as long as you respect me, you know, you don’t tell lies about me, you don’t plot to take all of my money” or whatever. So then you would have an Alexa or whatever, it would be constantly recording what everyone says, and that would be hooked up to a Smart Contract. And so if you tell some lie about the producer aristocrat, “He totally punched me the other day, he was a real ignoble asshole,” and that’s actually not true. Well, all of the speech that people are speaking would be constantly compared to some database of truth. It could be Wikipedia or whatever. And every single statement would have some sort of probability of being true or false, or something like that. That could all be automated through the Internet of Things feeding this information the internet, and basically checking it for truth or falsity. And then you have some sort of model that says, if a statement has a probability of being false that is higher than — maybe set it really high to be careful, right? —  95 percent, so only lies that can be really strongly confirmed… Those are going to get reported to the community as a whole.

If you have X amount of bad behaviors, then you lose your entitlement from the aristocrat producers. It’s noblesse oblige, the old kind of feudal term for basically an aristocratic communism, the [obligatory] generosity of the noble. So that’s all very skittish. A little sketch of how Internet of Things and Smart Contracts could be used to create this idea of a Rousseauean General Will.

The reason why this has never worked in history is because of lying, basically. People can always defect. People can always manipulate and say they’re going to do one thing but then not deliver. That’s on the side of the rich and also on the side of the poor. But what’s at least in sight now, is the possibility that we could define very rigorously the ideal expectations of everyone in a community and program that in transparent Smart Contracts, hook those up to sensors that are doing all of the work in the background, and in this way basically automate a radically guaranteed, egalitarian, communist system in which people do have different abilities, but everyone has an absolutely dignified lifestyle guaranteed for them as long as they’re not total [expletive] who break the rules of the group. You can actually engineer this in a way that rich people would find it preferable to how they’re currently living. So to me that’s a viable way of building communism that hasn’t really been tried before. And I think it really suits a patchwork model. I think that this would be something like an absolutely ideal patch, and not just in a productive, successful way. This is the ideal way to make a large group of people maximally productive and happy and feel connected and integrated. Like everyone has a place and everyone belongs, even if there’s a little bit of difference in aptitudes. The system, the culture, will reflect that. But in a dignified, and fair, and reasonable kind way, a mutually supportive way.

I was reminded of Justin’s hypothesis explicitly whilst watching this Netflix film, starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, called The Circle. The end of the film is a bit shit and sensationalist, and it is basically a feature-length Black Mirror episode, but it made me laugh a lot because, as far as I could tell, it was Murphy’s patch, precisely as he describes it here, acted out on screen.

It demonstrates, in an entertaining format, what stinks about his proposals for a Moldbuggian social transparency — and it’s beautiful.