BARBARIAN BUSHMEN OF THE BLOCKCHAIN

@oddnugget: The bushmen ought to create their own nomadic society and cryptocurrency. Yes, it's a crazy idea, but imagine what they could do. They could be a roaming clan of assassins or traders - maybe similar to gypsies and have their own international currency trade going on.

@edumurphy: That's a deeply cyberpunk notion you just put out there; very appealing fictional vision!

@oddnugget: Someone just needs to teach them to use computers.

@edumurphy: Heh. While funny, that's not insurmountable.

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The above quotes are from a brief but inspiring conversation between @oddnugget and myself on one of @gavvet's posts (I think he might even be turning it into some kind of fiction, maybe? 😁 - EDIT Sep 7 2017 - omg omg he actually did it )

It got me thinking.

One of the things blockchains enable is cryptocurrency. Together, the two in turn enable groups to smooth the process of being rewarded for what they do by merging the reward for building reputation with the reputation itself. If you are reading this, you are on Steemit and therefore already grasp exactly how this works.

But what if the group in quest is a bunch of hunter-gatherer throwbacks to the time before guns, before farms, before steel, before stone — before walls?

INSERT IMAGE HERE

If you find yourself possessed of a great deal of time, Venkatesh Rao's "Return of the Barbarian" is a fascinating piece of work. Really, you could say the same of anything with his name on it ... but let's not digress too far.

So. Rao's "Barbarian." Read it two years ago and was inadvertently reminded of it by @oddnugget. In that essay, Rao gives a sort of speculative history (based on an oldass book by some dude called Veblen) about the three types of human grouping that existed in the past (point being that they still do, just in differing proportions from back then):

• savages i.e. hunter-gatherers
• barbarians i.e. pastoral nomads and
• civilized i.e. people who live in fucking cities, aight?

Anyway, the money-shot was that the savages are ultimately irrelevant to history as anything other than predecessors, that the pastoral nomad barbarians are stronger, sharper and smarter than the civilized — BUT the civilized are better at taking the cumulative entirety of their best ideas and turning them into systems.

However, lest you think I am here to hagiographize Rao, I will point out that in that article, he never actually stated just how the barbarians are going to make their grand comeback in today's world (the most cursory look at which would answer the question of which human grouping won the context - by whatever standard you care to define winning) Also, I will point out that he rather underrates the hunter-gatherers who after all are basically barbarians with even less baggage.

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At the moment, the Kalahari bushmen (our hunter-gatherer savages) survive as fragile isolated remnants, tourist attractions and, in their literal best case scenario that doesn't involve completely giving up their culture and skillset, gamekeepers and bush guides in game reserves. In all cases, they have been crushed into marginal states by the death trap of modern civilization.

The walls, by any objective measure, closed in.

PICTURE TO BE INSERTED AT A LATER DATE. PROBABLY NEVER

Aight. Back to the original inspiration for all this. @oddnugget's notion, however William-Gibson-meets-Gods-Must-Be-Crazy it might seem, isn't as implausible as it seems at first glance.

The Kalahari bushman has an incredible set of skills, both physical and mental. What he doesn't have is a way to use those skills and live that life in today's world from a position of anything other than utter submission to a machine so incomprehensibly vast that just the edges of it are like the curvature of the earth to the naked eye. The workings within it that drive it and push it into what used to be his territory? Hahahaaha, fuhgeddaboutit; might as well be a Lovecraft protagonist trying to count Cthulhu's tentacles.

SERIOUSLY, WHAT PICTURE WOULD YOU PUT HERE?

So. All hope is lost then? Well, not yet. Our savage heroes are about to answer what Rao's barbarians didn't: how to operate effectively and with personal agency in the present day even as it shades into the worst nightmares of cyberpunk authors.

The answer lies with three things. We already mentioned the blockchain and the cryptocurrency that comes with it. We already mentioned that, just as Steemit rewards the blogger for doing blogger things, a currency could be envisioned that rewards the hunter-gatherer savage for doing hunter-gather things.

Several obvious questions arise from this: the most obvious being that Steemit requires a solid base of computer literacy, to say nothing of literal literacy. Our hunter-gatherers have neither of those and by definition cannot gain them without ceasing to exist. In short, mofuckers can't read, how they gonna run a Huntcoin wallet?

To answer that, I will refer you to an experiment conducted in India by a fella named Sugata Mitra. In the "Hole in the Wall" experiment, he embedded a computer terminal hooked up to the internet in an outside wall facing a slum alley just to see who would use it and how far they would get. To his surprise, random street urchins were the first ones there. Didn't take long at all for them to find their way online and start tooling around. Didn't take long after that for them to find MS Paint and the Disney channel website.

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These kids, as far as I can tell, were not only illiterate, they didn't speak English anyway.

Second obstacle is them having the literacy to run a coin wallet. For that, I have a somewhat more theoretical concept, that I first encountered from the late great Mac Tonnies back in the early 00s. He coined the term "eglyphics" which are basically the not-so-distant descendants of what we currently call emoji, a pictographic language for the post-literate world of holograms and touchscreens that we are transitioning into.

Kids prefer picture books anyway, right?

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Now, add to that the stuff scientists, strategic forecasters and deep time planners are trying to accomplish at nuclear waste dump sites by creating hazard signs that humans ten thousand years from now will be able to read and, for all practical purposes, understand. Stay the FUCK AWAY from THIS mountain or DIE HORRIBLY.

People talk a lot about "Oh, X is going to disrupt Y" nowadays like that actually means something. Haha. Well, put the above two paragraphs together and guess what, you just disrupted written language. Forever. Hurray.

As for the third question i.e. hardware — well the construction and extractive industries (and of course the military) already make extensive use of ruggedized laptops and tablets. A ruggedized wearable touchscreen, perhaps arm-mounted, loaded with an eglyphic interface isn't too hard to imagine.

@oddnugget's vision is starting to not look so implausible now, isn't it.

Don't know about the assassin part (that can stay in the science fiction version of this article, perhaps a plot by some decentralized James Bond Villain who likes having a cadre of African Wilderness Ninja at her beck and call) but the trader thing could work. In either case, our civilizationally traumatized half-extinct throwbacks just took a jump from penury to participation.

this one's really great, isn't it

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I just might come back to this. The topic has legs and miles to go before it sleeps. In the meantime, READ/RESTEEM/TELL YOUR FRIENDS oh and UPVOTE GODDAMMIT 😊