Proposals for a new social operating system

From: jimruttshow8596
Daniel Schmachtenberger, an independent thinker focused on the future of civilization, proposes a “hard fork hypothesis” for humanity’s future, combining a dire assessment of current trajectories with a hopeful vision for a radically different social order [00:21:00] [00:46:00] [02:52:00].

The Need for a New Social Operating System

Schmachtenberger contends that humanity faces an imminent self-termination if fundamental “design issues” in our current social operating system are not addressed [01:06:00].

Key issues necessitating a new system include:

• Historical Precedent and Amplified Scale While past civilizations collapsed due to internal decay, the current globalized civilization, armed with weapons of mass destruction and exponential technology, can cause planetary-scale harm to the biosphere [01:12:00] [01:40:00].
• Fundamental Generator Functions of Risk Catastrophic and existential risks, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, or global warfare, stem from underlying “generator functions” rather than isolated issues [02:18:00] [02:21:00] [04:21:00]. Addressing these functions categorically is essential for a non-self-terminating civilization [02:40:00] [04:22:00].
• The Problem of Technology and Rival Risk Games
  • Asymmetric Power Unlike natural evolution, human-created technology (including social tech like language and coordination) allows for rapid, uneven distribution of mutation/innovation [06:51:00] [07:08:00]. This breaks the power symmetry found in evolved systems [09:21:00]. A human acting as an apex predator can increase their predatory capacity vastly faster than the environment can build resilience, leading to collapse [08:55:00].
  • Unsustainable Growth Human impact, even through “constructive” activities like domestication of animals, represents a massive co-option of global biomass and energetics, growing exponentially and exceeding sustainable limits [10:41:00] [11:00:00]. This is exacerbated by “rebound effects” (Jevon’s paradox), where efficiency increases lead to greater exploitation rather than sustainability [14:16:00].
  • Self-Termination When humans engage in “rival risk games” (where an in-group benefits at the expense of an out-group or the commons) and can innovate new ways of winning via exponential technology, this leads to exponential harm in a finite system, resulting in self-termination [16:56:00] [17:55:00].
• Failures of Current Systems (Democratic Liberalism)
  • Perverse Incentives The current system has perverse incentives, such as economic benefits from environmental destruction or war, which prevent effective regulation [15:47:00].
  • Multipolar Traps Markets, without regulation, fall into “multipolar traps,” where individual actors doing what’s good for them in the short term leads to collective harm in the long term (e.g., tragedy of the commons, arms races) [23:18:00]. With exponential technology, the “bottom” of these races can become unrecoverable [25:07:00].
  • Governmental Limitations Governments, as top-down systems with a monopoly on force, are intended to solve multipolar traps [27:22:00]. However, agents within the government still operate with their own rival-risk incentives [29:03:00]. This “agency risk” is amplified by public choice theory, where economic power influences and corrupts law [30:00:00] [36:14:00].
  • Global Coordination Failure National governments are themselves caught in multipolar traps [30:04:00]. Supranational bodies like the UN are ineffective against nation-states with catastrophic capacities (e.g., nuclear weapons) [30:50:00]. The rise of decentralized exponential technologies allows non-state actors to wield catastrophic capacity, further undermining the rule of law globally [31:25:00].
  • Information Ecology Breakdown Rivalrous systems incentivize withholding true information (trade secrets, classified info) and spreading disinformation [39:34:00]. Exponential information technology amplifies this, creating a world where it’s hard to distinguish signal from noise, making effective coordination impossible [40:03:00] [41:17:00].
• Increasing Fragility Humans build complicated, fragile systems (e.g., a house from a tree) that increasingly subsume complex, antifragile natural systems [43:50:00]. This leads to an increasing fragility-to-antifragility ratio, making the overall system prone to collapse [44:23:00].
• Sociopathy and Power Structures Current power systems (corporations, governments) act as “strange attractors” for sociopathic individuals because they reward winning win-lose games and manipulation [51:54:00] [52:19:00]. This leads to a “fractal defection” where everyone internally defects from the whole while pretending not to [55:02:02].

Core Proposals for a New Social Operating System

The goal is to create a new social operating system that is a “safer vessel for power” [49:18:00] and addresses the generator functions of risk. This requires a different basis for human choice-making [49:26:00].

• Anti-Rival Risk Basis for Coordination
  • The new system must be “rigorously anti-rivalry” [18:10:00]. This means fundamentally changing the axioms of civilization, moving beyond nation-states and private balance sheets as bases for rivalry [18:20:00].
  • This implies a move from “rival risk” (my access decreases yours) to “non-rival risk” (my access doesn’t decrease yours, like shopping carts) and ultimately “anti-rival risk” (my well-being is positively coupled with yours) [01:05:07].
• Commonwealth Access vs. Private Property
  • The model of private property, where possession of scarce resources is incentivized, fosters artificial scarcity, hoarding, and misaligned agency [01:00:57] [01:02:50].
  • Instead, a system based on “commonwealth access” means resources are available for utilization by any part of the system as needed, without removal of access for others [01:02:45] [01:03:51].
  • This would lead to higher quality of life, lower resource load, eliminate grotesque duplication, and remove destructive competitive dynamics [01:04:28]. Technologies like blockchain could mediate this as a true commonwealth resource [01:04:45].
• Redefining Value and Identity
  • In a commonwealth system, basic needs and access are given, making “getting stuff” boring [01:06:31].
  • Identity would come from “what you create and contribute to the system,” rather than what you get [01:05:50]. Creative contributions are non-fungible and high-dimensional, making direct comparison difficult and fostering collaborative rather than rivalrous dynamics [01:06:06] [01:20:50].
  • People would be incentivized to support others’ self-actualization because their own lives directly improve through the resulting shared “Commonwealth” (e.g., access to better art, music) [01:06:40] [01:06:51].
• Addressing Sociopathy and Psychopathology
  • A healthy social system requires mechanisms to prevent psychological damage from going unnoticed and to ensure access to power isn’t granted to those who are psychologically unhealthy [01:00:07].
  • The “forced transparency” of smaller communities (like tribes or villages at the Dunbar number) could create an accounting system that disincentivizes sociopathic behavior by making defection noticeable and punishable [53:57:00] [54:22:00]. This is a “many-to-many” surveillance based on care, rather than top-down control [58:50:00].
  • Sociopathy is likened to a cancer cell; without mechanisms to limit its impact, it can leverage technology to corrupt the whole system [56:24:00].

Transitioning to a New System

The primary challenge is the transition from the current “game A” to this proposed “game B” [01:08:11].

• Blueprint Clarity An adequate blueprint for Game B must be clearly defined with necessary and sufficient architectural criteria [01:08:20].
• Superior Quality of Life Even the wealthiest people in the current system experience “shitty suboptimality” because intellectual property and proprietary designs limit access to the best possible products (e.g., phones made from combined best IP) [01:09:07]. The proposed system would offer a comprehensively better quality of life for everyone, including the currently wealthy, by removing these artificial barriers and fostering collaborative innovation [01:09:07] [01:10:53].
• Non-Weaponizable Advantage The new system must offer an “asymmetric advantage” that cannot be weaponized within the old power game [01:14:26]. A social technology that is inherently anti-rival risk and produces increased coordination capacity cannot be weaponized because it is the “solvent for weaponization itself” [01:15:39] [01:15:47].
• Information Ecology and Sense-Making By removing incentives for disinformation and information hoarding, the new system would foster an intact information ecology, leading to radically better collective sense-making, coordination, and innovation [01:16:50] [01:17:00].
• Building a New Attractor Basin The strategy is not to retrofit the current system, but to build a new “full-stack civilization” from the ground up [01:18:37]. This new system would become a new “attractor basin” [01:17:27], proving its superior quality of life and problem-solving capacity [01:17:33].
• Dependent Relationships and Open-Sourcing This new system would not directly challenge the old one militarily, but rather “export solutions” to groups that would otherwise be enemies, creating relationships of dependence [01:18:02]. The social technology itself would be open-sourced, fundamentally changing the basis for agency for those who adopt it [01:18:12].
• Beneficial Network Effects The system would create strong, beneficial network effects for those who play by positive, generative rules [01:19:10]. As its success is proven, early adopters and subsequent layers of people would join, committing to a doctrine that is subtly subversive of the old paradigm, based on a value orientation of dealing with each other as true peers [01:19:36] [01:20:02].