Way back in the day (10+ years) my girlfriend at the time and I would have these political conversations with a mutual friend of ours. This person was an elite senior developer at Blizzard Entertainment. In fact if I told you some of the significant things that he has accomplished you'd be able to look him up by name on Google. He was like the Dan Larimer of Blizzard back then.
In fact this person and I would talk all the time. He was the ultimate code grinding machine. Worked 80+ hours per week getting shit done. Sometimes when he would hang out we'd smoke pot and he would just pass out for an hour like instantly... lol (presumably because he was consistently sleeping like 4 hours a night).
But that's the thing about having that kind of drive and book smarts: you usually don't have a whole lot of imagination. I remember one day I caught him reading a book about how to be creative... lol.
I'm the opposite, so our conversations ended up being pretty crazy a lot of the time. I don't have the ability to work like that or grind 24/7, and I burn out very easily. But at the same time I have some pretty crazy ideas and end up being very good when theory-crafted a bit more.
Many of the game mechanics in WOW, Diablo 3, and Starcraft 2 are ideas that I fed to him in private. They were then filtered through the corporate machine and many of my ideas (modified or otherwise) actually ended up in the games I played all the time. It was pretty cool except he never really gave me credit for the them... which is fine because he was so corporate it might actually have been legally taboo for him to admit they were mine (Blizzard secrecy is cult-like). He may have even leveraged a promotion at one point with the goods that I gave him. I glad someone got some value out of my crazy brain back then.
In fact now that I think about it we were talking about what kinds of games Blizzard should create, and I hardcore pitched him the idea that they should make a game like Team Fortress 2 (because I was playing it at the time) but rather than having classes they should make individual heroes like League of Legends, each with 3-4 unique abilities (1 ultimate). Lo and behold years later Overwatch is created, so it's possible that the only reason that game exists is because of a random seed conversation I had years prior... so weird.
When I look back on all the times I've just been brainstorming for free and trying to create value, it's crazy to think just how much value may have been created from my ideas (impossible to measure), and I get no credit or value of my own in return.
This is why open source protocols like Hive are the ultimate generators and distributors of wealth. I've had tons of high value conversations with people around here. Many of the conversations I've had with Khal back in the day have yielded returns, and I get to invest in those ideas and returns directly rather than them just being swept up by a corporate entity. I've even joked with him that one day I'll go back and mint some of those Discord DMs as NFTs. We're gonna split the profits 50/50.
In addition, the last Hive hardfork pretty much implemented 100% of the "less is more" ideas that I had going in my blog. Again, I can't really take credit for such things because ideas are a dime a dozen and my ideas aren't particularly unique (most of the time) but it is what it is. My voice seems to matter around here, and the difference this time around is that I not only get paid for it, but can invest outside money into the protocol after the fact when other people have seemingly done the work for me.
But that's not what this post was supposed to be about.
My friend was fully drinking the corporate Kool-Aid back then. He loved his job, and he thought that everyone else should love their job as well. Clearly, this person has a very narrow perspective, which was usually the crux of these political arguments we would have.
One of the big arguments we had would always revolve around the lower class and imperialism/capitalism. We would tell him to look at how ridiculous our world is and how abysmal the distribution of wealth is (this was before Bitcoin even existed). Unfortunately, he trusts authority and the establishment 100% of the time... He would claim that everything was all good because technology creates abundance and the poor people of today have way more value and opportunity than the poor people of the past. In a way, this is true, and is worth exploring further.
My Kingdom for a time machine!
Kings of the past would have traded everything to be a poor person today. Imagine it: ruling everything; controlling everyone around you. Too bad you still have to shit in a bucket and die of a bacterial infection at 45. The kings of old would have easily traded everything they had just for basic things like running water, electricity, and automobiles. Things get really crazy when you add in TV and internet access. Imagine what people back then would think of society today. For at least the first year of their new life they'd be living in a magical world that everyone who was born in takes 100% for granted.
So yeah, even though the gap between the rich and poor is ever widening and the world is a ridiculous hypocritical paradox... sure, in many ways life today is much more convenient than even 100 years ago, let alone 1000, even when the poors are concerned.
There certainly is a point to be made that progress is progress... but at what cost? How much suffering did it take to get here? Does it even matter now that all of that is in the past and nothing can be done about it?
I think the arguments against this concept of progress at all costs gets even crazier when we realize how many resources we are wasting on a daily basis. People are the biggest resource, and 99% of the world is living in scarcity and providing a lot less value to society than they could be, as they keep their heads down and keep grinding day by day.
The question becomes: how much progress would humanity generate through time and space if we were actually living up to our full potential? I would make the argument that humanity is operating at around 1% efficiency, so theoretically it is possible that we could be making 100x more progress in the ideal scenario. Could you imagine that? 100 years of technological gains in a single year? Literally no one can imagine it, yet I still maintain that it is possible (however unlikely).
Cryptocurrency allows us to raise the bar in this regard: For the means of production to be given back to the people. Anyone who works on a project in any way can be rewarded with crypto for their efforts, which incentivizes them even harder to provide more help in the future, creating a chain-reaction of value generation, progress, and synergy. This isn't something you can't get from the legacy economy under any circumstances, as those at the top are continually sucking down 100% of all value possible and leaving very little scraps for the rest of us.
Conclusion
No matter what the argument, one thing is certain: technology creates abundance. The only question that remains is a simple one: what happens when our economic systems lean into that abundance, rather than relying on artificial scarcity to extract value from humans that are constantly thrown under the bus? What happens when instead of getting thrown under the bus and living paycheck to paycheck, people can look up from the toil and provide exponential value within a superior system? I guess we're about to find out.
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Return from The Evolution of Technology: My kingdom for a horse! to edicted's Web3 Blog
