Interesting Speculation about Blockchain and Future Society

I recently read The Blockchain Man (Or A Speculative Sociology of Our Blockchain Future) and still processing what it means and with what parts I agree or disagree.  Instead of trying to analyze or summarize the whole document, I will list some of the sections and call out a couple of specific points I found interesting.

These sections had the most interesting names.

• The Anatomy of our Blockchain Future
• The Balkanization of Everything: City States are The New Nation States
• The Hollywood Model is the New Career Ladder
• Probabilism is the New Determinism
• Protocolism is the New Nationalism

One of the sections introduces the “self-owning car” and how commuting could be market driven.

A car that pays for its lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. It is a corporation. The car exists as an autonomous financial entity, potentially with no human ownership.

When the Blockchain Man gets in the car, he will see a sliding scale offering him the ability to set an arrival time and calculate the cost of the ride. If he wants to arrive quickly, the car will make a flurry of micropayments to other cars allowing it to pass. If he’s not in a hurry, he may choose a later arrival time and lower fare, allowing other cars fly past in return for the lower fare.

The “The Hollywood Model is the New Career Ladder” section reminded me of the task based scenarios from Four Futures for Work in America.

In two of these scenarios, we will continue to work mostly in jobs, one where there’s less work available in total (what we called the King of the Castle Economy, a winner-take-all game) and one where there’s more work available (the Go Economy, where you can keep building as long as you want).

In the two scenarios where work evolves mostly into tasks, one has less work for us to do (the Rock-Paper-Scissors Economy, where we continue to compete in short spurts), and one more (the Jump Rope Economy, where individual workers can control the pace and pattern of their own careers, as long as they keep jumping).