Tokenizing Succession

Soliciting the Center, Prolonging the Imperative, Curating Events

We can compress the hyperstitching of soliciting the center with prolonging the imperative (credit/ledgering with scenic design) by defining money as options on succession—that is, credit determined by the likelihood of one or another change in occupancy of the center. This will entail thinking about succession not only along the top line, so to speak, but in terms of the juridical and disciplinary orders as, ultimately, part of an ongoing succession ceremony. In this way, singularize succession in perpetuity provides us with a way of designing possible lines of succession from the current order in which power is increasingly centralized while the occupant of the center is subjected to ever more grotesque virtual sacrifices to one in which sacrifice is distilled from succession and central power clarified through reduction to supervision of nomic distributions. Various juridical and disciplinary lines of succession currently substitute for open succession practices through competition over which line (which articulation of social, economic, cultural, political, etc. theories and enclaves) can most credibly claim to control depositions at the center. There are different pacings here and differential power—habits of determining interest rates at the Federal Reserve have a different weight and continuity than habits of working out the nuances of gender theory in American universities—but once power has been handed over even merely to the central bank no limits can be set in advance regarding the force of given levers over the central occupant. Part of our hyperstitching, then, is “suturing” those juridical and disciplinary sites through counter disciplinary and juridical practices so as to trace a path toward open succession. This also means that all of those factors that must be priced in to our solicitations of the center, or our various ways of drawing credit as advantageously (as close to forgiveness and far from penalty) as possible are really components of succession—whatever, that is, goes into calculations of the volatility that derivatives and arbitrage profit from is part of the field of succession and therefore everything pertinent to succession is part of what makes money money. If the market goes up in expectation of a change of administration in the White House, or a shifting of power centers within an administration, then it is also going up and down in expectation of developments within critical theory or aesthetic innovation, even if the latter are too much on the margins of existing forecasting methods to be brought (yet) explicitly into calculations. So, when you decide what to do with your money, in whatever form you hold your money, you are tokenizing succession.

The meaning of the derivative is that any event that might possibly occur, at any time, could be a source of expected future earnings insofar as any event will impinge upon the value of some property or asset that might be bought and sold. We could say that the prediction market is a very pure form of capitalism, precisely because they redirect investment to the event itself. Prediction markets, though, are constrained by the difficulty of determining what is to count as the outcome of an event: aside from officially approved outcomes, like elections and sporting events, whether something has happened is always open to contestation. You can assign third parties to determine whether, for example, inflation has increased to a particular extent and thereby settle bets on that but it’s easy to see how hard-won and easily-lost such trust would be. So, there might be a market for nominalizing and curating events, to represent them as more robust sources of value rather than just in terms of their effect on properties and assets already recognizable within the market. The way I have been proposing doing this is through the deployment of the juridical, based on the proposition that any event can be represented as a site of potential conflict rising to a formal level, which, in juridical terms, means such things as offense, complaint, suit, etc., with two claimants and some adjudication and the settlement would be what constitutes an event as an event. My post on Thirdness a while back laid out the logic of this approach. We then have the basis for a company that, in essence, constructs and curates events, at any scale and of whatever duration might attract betting interest. We would be saturating the world with high quality events. We might think of it as a a kind of editorial process superstructured over and transforming the “raw material” of the stream of poorly differentiated events confronting us now. This is a matter of prolonging the imperative because this is irreducibly a technological problem, one of gathering and preserving data, creating platforms with layers of authentication, new levels of the nomos upon which claims regarding distribution can be made.

There are no intrinsic limits regarding how to construct events—what might be seen as a single event, in particular for its direct participants (all of these terms are getting hard to stand by), can readily be constructed an indefinite number of ways, depending upon the kinds of complaints and micro-complaints and counter-complaints we might extract from it—we can just follow the immense complexity of modern legal systems here. The purpose here is not to intensify litigiousness but, by anticipating it, tokenize emergent resentments as modes of deferral and thereby defer recourse to the law. Legal framings flow into ethical and aesthetic gestures (I am using the words “ethical” and “aesthetic” in brackets) on the condition that judgments remain guardian of that space between the lower and the upper (revolutionary) vendettas. The question here is how to create derivatives and options out of this practice so that, first of all, there is a way of describing future events that might be wagered on before we can know the contestants in and terms of those events. What, that is, is the equivalent of building a prediction market for the 2032 presidential election outside of such a regularly scheduled event? We already inevitably anticipate the future—it is built into language—so the problem is how to cover, to saturate, futurity with discrete chunks of events that remain the same through all the changes in personnel, means, constraints, and so on that intervene between the anticipation and the realization. If we can do this, such futures markets would serve as currency, replacing existing currencies so we are simply exchanging degrees of confidence in various outcomes as avenues of access to participation in some capacity on one or another team. We would then be “fixing,” in both senses of the word, the market as we trade on it and transition to something that will no longer be the market but, rather, options on controlled usurpations and shuffling of succession promises across institutions.

We need “running” events that are continually being closed and reopened through judgments, so in buying a position on them you are seeing fluctuations in value regularly while also holding an asset one might expect to have certain expected future returns. We might organize such event creation around lawsuits targeting major institutions—banks, universities, government, companies, etc. We need the form of a particular suit that might conceivably, under rigorously considered juridical conditions, be brought at any point, now or in the future, against the institution or some official position within it. So, for example, a fraud lawsuit against the Federal Reserve according to a particular understanding, specified in advance, of the legal terms of money and debt issuance. The problem lies in making this the same lawsuit, tried repeatedly, with potentially different results each time; or, at any rate, the same something done repeatedly. You can start the token with a case drawn in 50/50 terms, so as to try and solicit an equal number of bets on each side and then every day, or week, or month, etc., you bring in new data, curated according to the original form, and the bettors use that new data to revise their bets, which is to say buy and sell that derivative (e.g., the “fed fraudulence, yes/no” derivative—of which there would be many): will the fed be convicted of fraud? You can then buy an option to have the “yes” position in, say, 2 or 5 years, and then you can sell that option, etc. With social media the bet may be on how closely site moderation approximates legal principles of incitement, fraud and slander, again, choosing the present as a baseline which can be given a numerical representation; the university, or various sectors or departments, how closely they approximate the form of disciplinary inquiry, according to some model of inquiry. You can see how this only works if we tether the prediction market to the terms of good governance, which is to say, orderly succession. People would be free to try and influence the outcome by making the bank less fraudulent, social media more rationally moderated, the university more devoted to inquiry, etc. They would then be betting on the effectivity of their own activity. Since the easy assumption right now is that the Fed will become increasingly fraudulent, social media increasingly unhinged, the academy increasingly frivolous and narrowly politicized, those betting on order and succession would be going long on the institutions (or, more broadly, their functions) and the incentives for doing so would be to identify those with faith in reparative practices, allow them to know each other and distinguish themselves from “doomsters” and because if your options become worthless, in the long run no one else’s would be of much value either. You thereby set up an open competition between those shorting and those longing the system, and those shorting it need not be seen as traitors or subversives because they are providing useful information. (And even those going long might hedge a bit.) The existence of the market, then, serves as a kind of mirror on these institutions while coming to serve as currency for the social order more generally. If the institutions change in significant ways so that, e.g., according to the opening terms the fed would lose or win every lawsuit easily (so that betting on the outcome would dry up) the values would be adjusted accordingly, as would the higher political stakes; if the institutions cease to exist (e.g., new institutions of inquiry and pedagogy replace the university) some way of rolling the bets over can be found—you want to select social forms that are necessary enough so that they will always exist and so different versions can be commensurated—credit, inquiry, judgment. Ultimately, if the system drifts or is accelerated toward an absence of truth and justice, this model collapses, since it is intended to, first of all, be a bulwark against precisely that. But various resets might be possible before the model need be abandoned altogether.

The turning point toward approximating orderly succession would come when those shorting the system, in realizing that they are in fact providing information, begin to see themselves as raising the standards for transparent succession even higher than those intending to long the system. Everyone would then be betting on enhancing succession practices, with the differences being over which judgments would best do so, thereby providing information for the governance system. The completion of this process would entail turning these future options into currency, whether that be the only currency or a kind of reserve currency backing all others and replacing or marginalizing national currencies. The future options would then have to be converted into units that can be tokenized and used for exchange. We could, for now, call the units “inaugs,” as short for the ceremony of succession, the inauguration, giving us the question of what counts as a inaug? An inaug might be a rightly predicted case outcome. For this to work we would have to assume homogeneity across all the different futures or, better, succession markets. Judgments on the beauty or revelatory character of a work of art would have to be commensurable with judgments on a case of fraud, and, in fact, they are commensurable insofar as they are decisions on cases. We would have to accept leveling all the cases, which means the real, social importance of any case is irrelevant for tokenizing purposes. This doesn’t present any problem—we already do this kind of leveling all the time—it’s implicit in quantification: shares in a biomedical firm developing cures are measured in dollars just like shares in a cannabis firm. But if we are to assume the homogenization of judgments across cases and fields we must work to produce it by selecting cases that approach 50/50 as closely as possible and doing so regularly which in turn would require the kind of constant computation currently devoted to mining crypto, and the judgments themselves must include transparency in data and criteria of judgment. A large part of the workforce would be involved in producing currency, which would therefore be done by a company or cluster of companies overlapping with the central data security firm. Knowledge production, technological innovation, currency generation and sovereignty are thereby knit or stitched very closely together. We could imagine individuals dealing in inaugs, but the heaviest trade would be by teams, who would only minimally be gambling as, much like current practices of hedging and arbitrage, most would place inaugs on both sides of every case, tilted slightly one way each time. So, does an individual or team keep inaugs in the bank? I think, rather, they are all already called for, advanced to other teams within the supply chain or rolled over on the succession markets, with slight adjustments around the edges, especially as succession becomes increasingly distanced from usurpation. I have suggested in the past that the entire market might be transferred directly over to the succession map, and that is the end game where, within a subscription order in which goods and services are accessed through teams that operate through adjustments on a pre-existing supply chain with those adjustments regulated through reciprocal interventions (“controlled usurpations” as options) in each others’ companies by leadership teams as a kind of back up to routine negotiations or arrangements. In this case, the “value” or “price” of anything lies in the calculability of the succession practices of the firms involved in its production, ultimately reaching down into the educations systems reproducing the team.

The (very critical) mid point, then: exchange completely converted over to inaugs. As always, I want to think in terms of an end point that can be instituted within companies today, as a way of getting to that end point or some modified version of it. In that case, I may not have much to add to Thirdness, other than the tokenization through inaugs, or maybe “futures,” or some other name, with such tokens to serve as private money offering access to, say, certain job or apprenticeship pools, much like donations to a political campaign give you a chance to meet and dine with candidates, members of his team and other high profile donors. Creating this new kind of prediction market would itself institute new educational institutions, focused on judging ever more detailed, complex and high stakes cases. I haven’t returned to it here, but the predictions as currency only works with a very high degree of trust in the honesty and competence of the companies running the prediction markets and part of the argument for such an approach is precisely to gear the social order to producing the kind of literacies that would justify such trust