Thirdness

I’d like here to outline a proposal for a company which would put into practice the trajectory of my thinking of the center up until this point, which could start small while containing the capacity to scale up indefinitely, and which is fully imaginable as a new reality while perhaps also taking form as an aesthetic object. The proposal is first of all an extension of my centering of the juridical as a minimal condition for the constitution of events: nothing “happens” that could not be framed as including potential claimants before some tribunal. The juridical is secondary to the ritual, on one side, and dependent upon the disciplinary, on the other. The ritual is the originary form take by events, so, in centering the juridical I am posing the juridical as an extension of the ritual, one that takes shape under the originary distribution of imperial conditions. The implication for the disciplinary, which also constructs events through the experimental method but only by eliminating or controlling for the human construction of the event itself, is that all inquiry is itself framed by and directed back to, by whatever complicated route, the juridical—even strictly scientific inquiry relies upon the occupation of spaces, the ownership (in some form) of equipment, the proper publication of results, preservation of data, and so on, all of which is unthinkable without the juridical—and which ultimately serves various forms of centered ordinality. We may be able to imagine social order taking the form of a single laboratory in which all human beings work as simultaneously subjects and objects of inquiry but even there we would find the equivalent of a nomos, an originary distribution, with allocations of resources and responsibilities, which would only make sense given the possibility of adjudication.

Once the juridical is centered in this way as, among other things, the irreducibly human in the increasingly permeable and manipulable boundaries separating humans from nature and technology, a new mode of inquiry presents itself. To understand and represent any event is to represent it as composed of implicitly juridical instances in which complainants and tribunal could be singled out, hypothetically and conceptually. To talk about a war, for example, would be to sort out claims and counter-claims the respective sides do and might make against each other and the kind of tribunal that might sit in judgment. This would be an open-ended and in principle infinite inquiry, as injuries and judgments generate new injuries and judgments and various appeals processes, opening of closed cases, and so on would become the substance of discussion. Even more, it is a mode of inquiry that could be scaled up to the highest global level, including all of those agencies “implicated” in the war through systems of alliances, arms sales, corporate collusion and so on; it could be scaled down to the micro-level, including creating new virtual spaces of judgment within each of the adversaries; and time frames can be prolonged or contracted, with judgments either instantaneous or projected decades or centuries ahead, perhaps as a footnote in some future history book or as a literary allusion. This would really be formalizing, making explicit, the way we already (tacitly) discuss everything, as we never completely set aside basic questions of resentment and reciprocity in our examination of or participation in any event. The best theoretical thinking always aims at making the tacit explicit, which is to say the creation of pedagogical platforms, which is always a technological matter.

In its original form this proposal was to be, in the first instance, a journal, which would publish essays framing events as hypothetical, potential or virtual “cases,” so as to create an ongoing layering of judgment as a civilizational exercise. But this was to lay the ground for the creation of a kind of arbitration firm, as the power of the analysis demonstrated in the essays written for the journal would recommend the practitioners of this mode of inquiry as an impartial arbiter for real world disputes. This would appeal most immediately to parties with genuine, good-faith disputes, with each side believing that if only its side were fully heard, they would be vindicated. This also means that those parties interested in honing grudges for the sake of institutional blackmail would avoid the firm like the plague. This in itself would draw a firm line between serious and frivolous disputants. All this would depend, of course, upon the reliability of the firm’s judgments—only insofar as those judgments and the reasoning offered for them were seen to be impartial could its success as a company and metric of civilizational layering be assured. The success of the firm would in turn entrench its judgments as models to be emulated. The judgments would exemplify the juridical, but operate extra-legally, on the model of the following provision in George Washington’s will:

that all disputes (should any unhappily arise) shall be decided by three impartial and intelligent men, known for their probity and good understanding; two to be chosen by the disputants—each having the choice of one—and the third by those two. Which three men chosen, shall, unfettered by law, or legal constructions, declare their sense of the Testator’s intention; and such decision is, to all intents and purposes to be as binding on the parties as if it had been given in the Supreme Court of the United States.

So, the journal/firm was not to be bogged down in legal interpretation in the narrow sense but was, rather, to aim at restoring a “sense” of the juridical under the assumption, indisputable in my view, that we have been witnessing over the past several decades an increasingly irreparable corrosion of the same. 

The journal/firm was to have an innovative technological component, employing specially trained large language models and data search and analysis programs so as to pose questions at scales and with precision and speed that would not have previously been possible. But the thought of how to make this a genuinely profitable business and one that would draw investors (even just to play out its possibilities as an aesthetic object) and, ultimately, as I have been arguing any firm must if it is to flourish and remake the world, issue currency, led me to think of the model of the stock market and derivatives, which loomed large in Zack Baker’s and mine “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center”: all this must be included and operationalized. The notion of a prediction market then presented itself (God only knows how these thought thresholds where a new idiom presents itself “happen”). The limit, thus far, of betting upon events is that only an event with an official closure can take bets—sporting events are the most obvious example, as the rules for determining winners and losers are transparent and unchanging. Similarly with gambling in casinos. In the public world, only elections have that kind of closure—and here we can already start to see how betting on elections presupposes the integrity of the process—if it came to be taken for granted that elections were regularly, even if not invariably, fixed, then betting on elections would cease to be possible; or, perhaps, they would take on a very different character, in which one would be betting, implicitly at least, on whether they will fix it this time. But it’s easy to see how unstable such a system would be, as those doing the fixing could also be betting on the markets. In principle, of course, any event could be bet on—what will be the inflation rate in 6 months, who will win a particular war, what will turn out to be the case in some disputed factual case—but in all of these cases a stable betting market would depend upon the reliability of the measures of inflation, or the agreement on what counts as “winning” a war, or the trustworthiness of some arbiter of factuality (some media outlet, government agency or courtroom). Otherwise, how would one know whether to pay out? The range of events that could be bet on can be treated as an index to the, let’s say, “replicability” of existing institutional arrangements.

The mode of juridical thinking I have been proposing would solve this problem and make it possible to bet on any event precisely by constituting events as juridical, in which case the market would depend upon the faith invested in the company constructing events and issuing judgments. The overtly and strongly pro-social and pro-civilizational nature of the project is thereby retained: higher forms of judgment are being modeled. Thinking about this on the largest scale possible, such a company would then be constituting hundreds, maybe thousands of events continually by identifying the parties and virtual tribunal that would be rendering judgment. You would really be betting less on the event itself than on the judgment rendered, which itself means that the interval between constituting the event and rendering judgment (which would be done continually, on a rolling basis), where the information gathering, analysis and thought are “input” is where the uncertainty lies. (You could think about it as betting on the referee’s calls rather than on the game or discrete units of the game, as long as you keep in mind that the refs are always making calls including all the calls they don’t make, and the fact that every move made by every player is shaped by that player’s sense of what the refs might call, how, and what falls below the threshold of their attention.) We would keep publicizing prospective claimants within a possible dispute with an outcome including a range of results such that an either/or bet is plausible with a time frame for judgment giving people enough time (what counts as “enough” might vary widely) to examine the issue and lay bets. It would even be possible to make available the datasets upon which the LLMs and other forms of data search used to organize inquiry into the cases are trained along with, to the extent possible, the weighting done in the training, so one’s betting is itself an attempt (perhaps aided by AI) to guess at the way artificially generated representations of events will in turn be interpreted. The better a bettor is able to enter the mode of inquiry being modeled, which is to say, the more the bettor scales up his civilizational intuitions and follows events closely, or perhaps creates his own organization or firm to do so, the more successful he will be on the market. Perhaps some successful bettors will join the company or create similar firms of their own. Meanwhile, the company would want to frame all events so as to make the odds essentially 50-50, so that the company, like any bookie, just skims the vig off the top. This might lead to idiosyncratic framings of events—rather, than, say, whether one party is going to be found guilty or liable, the bet will be on the degree or mode of guilt or liability. Hard cases might make bad law but they make good rods for honing meta-juridical thinking on.

Since framing events at various levels of granularity in such a way that bets can always be either/or poses challenges that maybe only computation can solve. What would it take, say, to be able to construct dozens of bets on bureaucratic decisions that might set the closure of the event (one party being found to have done an injury to another requiring precisely this particular payment) with a specific deadline, and then another bet to be closed an hour later, and so on; that is, with something resembling the rapidity with which one can trade stocks? How far in advance could bets be set; would bets have to be canceled if the presupposing conditions ceased to exist, or could systems be constructed for converting a bet on one occurrence to a bet on another should the presupposed conditions of the first lapse? We could start small but to fully realize the system it would have to be continually expanding, perhaps to eventually encompass all social activity and become a means of holding wealth to be used as collateral and hence as currency: someone with an established track record would be able to sell off pieces of bets held, perhaps far into the future, while bets held with a certain prospect of pay-off could serve as collateral. But in that case we might as well transition into settlements represented as data exchanges, in which, say, the winning party is granted certain surveilling rights over the loser, who is in turn hemmed in with certain behavorial conditions tethered to those surveilling rights, with these arrangements setting the terms for the formalizing of future events. This will be a virtual justice system with no direct impact on the world and it might become a kind of marginal, “dissident,” even “prophetic” reproach of a world where the eruption of vendettas from below and degeneration of succession practices from above render the originary distribution increasingly a mere base for launching sabotage operations. Or, it might gradually come to approximate the real world by proving a model for new disciplinary elites to infiltrate and reform institutions. Perhaps we would look for a tipping point where it becomes profitable for institutions to take longer term bets on higher internal levels of justice or fluid data exchanges in anticipation of improved succession practices.  Thirdness would then become the one big company, continually closing but never, Achilles and the tortoise-like, quite, the gap between prediction and realization across all human orders.

While increasing the degree of computational governance by creating what we could call, referencing an older project initiated by Buckminster Fuller back in the 1960s, the “world game,” that game remains linguistically grounded. The idioms of center study center are to be sharpened and serve as intelligences formalizing events in terms of succession, the threshold separating the vendetta from the juridical, the conversion of assets into data, the intersections of outside option and outside spread, debt enforcement and debt forgiveness. originary debt and the donation of resentment to the center, the dynamic of same and other, same and like, the oscillation of doing and happening and so on—indeed, part of the project would be idiom mining so as to sharpen formalizations of events. We can only know what is to count as an institution and therefore an event, in such terms—otherwise we could never step outside of the nominalistic closure of empirical institutions. In other words, we could never enter the juridical “as such,” “unfettered by law or legal constructions.” Representation as the deferral of violence can never be transcended nor can the paradoxes of the center that follow, including the paradox of power whereby the more “absolute” the power the less it is experienced as such insofar as all the teaming and breeding is designed into scenes as pedagogical platforms that also make the scenes and technology transparent vectors of newly exhibited and discovered human mark-ups of those reciprocally present.

Just as with the initial idea for a journal, I would anticipate this prediction market becoming a Schelling Point for all manner of social inquiries and practical projects. One sees occasional references to betting markets today as a way of orienting oneself towards events, but this doesn’t seem to have had any real influence on those events. Thirdness (a reference to Washington’s third man as well as Peirce’s concept of generality and significance created through agreement) would succeed here by generating hitherto unseen and unnamed event clusters that evade the radar of the media and even the world’s intelligence agencies, who would surely take an active interest in its doings. Ultimately it should become the new media, or a kind of world brain. This would all depend upon establishing and sustaining traditions of juridical thinking and impartiality that remain immune to the markets it makes and oversees—we are speaking of very high levels of integrity and impartiality that would need to be periodically pedagogically renewed. The argument implicit here is that only such an institution, and its spread through all institutions, can transition humanity past the current recording of debt through state-initiated expropriations and sabotage and create a new center as central intelligence. As I would have hoped for the journal, the prediction market would also transition into arbitration and consulting contracts, which would in turn serve as data gathering, or new data exchange markets. It would make inroads into existing media and educational institutions, condition new modes of representation and pedagogy becoming a universal intelligence infrastructure. All under the condition that humans can increasingly identify and master modes of the deferral of violence at ever higher scales. Progress in this direction would be the best “proof” of the originary hypothesis.

So, that’s the project—as always, I’m glad to leave it open source because no one could do this without me or, perhaps, at some point people who have learned quite a bit from me. We’ll see if there are any takers; perhaps future posts will simulate an ongoing prediction market on the likelihood of various possible kinds of takers.