Autonomous Maintenance Quotes

I wish people used wishes to modify themselves instead of others. Wish to be low maintenance. Wish to be autonomous, even.

They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia. None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.

Now, the obvious response is that a state like Venezuela can still try to beat someone up to get that solution, do the proverbial rubber hose attack to get their password and private keys — but first they’ll have to find that person’s offline identity, map it to a physical location, establish that they have jurisdiction, send in the (expensive) special forces, and do this to an endless number of people in an endless number of locations, while dealing with various complications like anonymous remailers, multisigs, zero-knowledge, dead-man’s switches, and timelocks. So at a minimum, encryption increases the cost of state coercion. In other words, seizing Bitcoin is not quite as easy as inflating a fiat currency. It’s not something a hostile state like Venezuela can seize en masse with a keypress, they need to go house-by-house. The only real way around this scalability problem would be a cheap autonomous army of AI police drones, something China may ultimately be capable of, but that’d be expensive and we aren’t there yet.41 Until then, the history of Satoshi Nakamoto’s successful maintenance of pseudonymity, of Apple’s partial thwarting of the FBI, and of the Bitcoin network’s resilience to the Chinese state’s mining shutdown show that the Network’s pseudonymity and cryptography are already partially obstructing at least some of the State’s surveillance and violence. Encryption thus limits governments in a way no legislation can.

Freud and Jung, with their intense focus on the autonomous individual psyche, placed too little focus on the role of the community in the maintenance of personal mental health.