Cody Hergenroeder

basically, civilization is a coordination technology. our chosen economic technology, whether capitalist or some other thing, is a coordination technology. our cities are a coordination technology. high-level patterns arise from low-level incentives. show me the incentive, and i'll show you the high-level emergent shape of outcome.

i want to understand how it all got so fucked up. some kind of collusion between city planners, road-dominated cities (thanks to post WWII New Deal roadbuilding, and cities being built around the car roads), a rejection of seemingly less civilized ways of living, the emergence of the postwar American suburb.

right now, wealth is concentrating in the hands of the few. we are reaching heretofore unseen (presumably) levels of wealth concentration. they call it wealth inequality. previous economic philosophies of the people being inherent owners of the means of production are being challenged, and capital is deanchoring from what humans have to give. "we are the economy" is how i felt before, now in a post-automation world, i'm not sure what the economy is other than things that need building, builders, institutions, and people with the capital to move it all.

i would like to align incentives such that humans are incentivized to undertake new entrepreneurial endeavors, to design and make art. i would like artists to get paid directly by those who listen to them—spotify subscriptions should go to artists, not to a massive company that hardly caters to music-lovers or musicians.

i would like to align incentives such that people have what they need to survive. such that housing is abundant, and just living doesn't feel like a financial nightmare. [1]

I'd like to understand the emergence of language.

I'd like to understand the emergence of game-theoretic aggression and cooperation behaviors at different levels of organization.

I'd like to understand the emergence of economic technologies such as capitalism and communism, and how individual transactions lead to the emergence of a larger economy.

i'd like to understand the emergence of collective culture, including how individual artistic expression leads to mass patronage.

I’d like to understand the emergence of political organization, fractally and at different levels, especially under different political technologies.

we are all striving towards higher degree of wellness. this maps onto my sense of human progress. i’d like for all humans to experience deeper senses of wellness, rife with vitality, vivaciousness, and aliveness. These qualities are essential aspects of human flourishing and their absence should be made salient so that we can always easily coordinate to fix.

“We” have not always been human. There is a clean line from your immediate ancestors (parents, grandparents), to your more extended family ancestors (your great-great-greats who came from other countries and experienced very different lives thousands of years ago, but were still homo sapiens with similar intellectual capabilities) to your distant genetic ancestors which took on entirely different forms, forms which you would probably consider “alien”. I bring up this connecting with our deep ancestors because it’s an alien truth, and it’s the way our progenitors will feel about us and we will feel about our progenitors. They will look quite different from us, in ways that we are likely to feel challenged or repulsed by, due to their alien-ness. But what we must keep in mind is that what it means to be human is far from a complete story. We don’t know what it means to be human, but as we pursue greater human-ness, we will come to let go of old ways of doing and of being. I have a sense that as we self-actualize, we will take greater ownership of our role as a meaningmaker in the cosmos, a great organizer of information, a creator of systems, and a steward for aliveness, a steward for lifeforce in general.

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• fractional-reserve banking
• cryptocurrency
• Austrian Economics

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/ qigong / qi, vitality, nourishment, life force [1]

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