Local Clarity, Global Precedent: The Legal Question
By Kyle Smith | bestape
Words & (c-b)/a “base scale” mathart at the inaugural Vitalia.city summit for startup societies.
The scope of local and global lacks a sharp separation between local and global. Haecceity gets confusing at high fidelities, especially navigating the unexplored, and “dunce” still being used as a shaming tool frustrates accelerated improvement of this scientific methodology.
Most important, however, is the fact that it’s humans all the way down. Local in that humans are the atomic part and global in that the part is atomic. When we discuss whether the government should do this or private enterprise should do that, we are still using the same underlying assets to get it done: humans.
Hence why we run ourselves around in essentially the same slow-spirals, effectively in circles. By putting different masks on the same face, we fool ourselves into believing that we are trying a different experiment rather than variations on the same experiment: humans are always the atomic element in meaningful governance functions, public and private.
More atomic than humans all the way down is electromagnetism all the way down. There is less variation between the atoms of electromagnetism than of humans, but some variation such as the law of proximity remains clear as day.
More atomic than electromagnetism all the way down is wave-particle duality all the way down. The atoms here are patterns, are measurements, and with such little variation between atoms the local-global paradigm is more symmetric than irreversible. The law of proximity as a variation is unclear, hence the duality.
Well-defined local and global is dipolar: local is the end-point along a range and global is the other end-point along the range. Of course, this is a self-referencing mental model as each pole is a local concept and polar is a global concept. Dipole not multipole because of the electromagnetic atomic limit. As an Infinite object the pole, the edge, is not a point but rather a token with a vanishing point limit inside it: 2D orthogonal x 1D diagonal. Noether’s law of global symmetry (or conservation) is the first principle of prescient mental models. Note that the symmetries of local and global can be discrete within boundaries or continuous within a limit. Furthermore, the dimensions of local and global is spacetimescale change, not only a snapshot state.
Modern technologies have, according to the human conscious experience of time, seemingly collapsed the locality of cybernetic proximity from dipole into a monopole (hereafter, “monopole moment”). We can now real-time talk to each other tête-à-tête halfway across the Globe (Earth). Yet, there is nothing new under the Sun.
When we interact with our smartphones, we’re leveraging the latency of proximity between the remote-from-each-other scalar points of nanoscopic and consciousness; though neurons are nanoscopic, there is a delay as the subconscious collects and renders consciousness.
It helps to first analyze the local and global dynamics of human governance before humanity successfully collapsed the cybernetic dimension into a monopole moment via modern telecommunications. Before the monopole moment, with humans as the atomic, the initial local follows the law of proximity and builds bottom-up. After a certain maturity, global emerges out of local and feedbacks into local top-down. This feedback can franchise onto other locals.
Information is physical after all. The pyramids weren’t built from the top-down, despite their promontory at the top once built. Global here is not global like the Globe but global in its control relationship with other locals. It is global as a relationship within and between hierarchies, remembering that the Globe in ratio to itself is smoother than a marble.
Compare Canadian Paramountcy with the USA’s Tenth Amendment. There are always some aspects that are bottom-up and some aspects that are top-down. The mature system is fractal feedback that cross-pollinates violently and nonviolently with neighbors. However, in the history of these systems, global complexity initially emerges from polycentric local complexity and then global and local influence, as well as consolidate each other along multiple nodes. The divergent and convergent process resembles air breathed into and out of the lungs.
Importantly, powerful top-down is a reduction of the bottom-up in which for the most part only relatively rare symmetries remain. Generally, the vast majority of the bottom-up emergence becomes asymmetric at some point and, as such, does not continue all the way to the top. Discrete patterns unfit for long-distance control are far more common than suitable patterns, Infinite patterns are the least likely.
Phenomena like the UCC model law are interesting, because they suggest the contract law symmetries between states while states themselves determine the actual laws. This balances interstate global efficiencies with tailor-fitting the state-by-state local efficiencies. Compilations such as The ULex Kernel offer a more complete proscription than UCC alone. In this way, there is no federal imposition but rather a healthy variety to handle regional differences that is effectively interdata.
If done right, we can industrially scale up rare symmetries and avoid the pitfalls of attempting to scale up the far more common asymmetries. Our greatest inventors find these graces. But if achieved, in many ways this should be the default behavior since it follows the most trodden paths of least resistance. Fewer heads far from the herd is easier to defend. The lowest latency available in the transmission that requires variation in signal to send messages.
Now that we are within the cybernetic monopole moment, we can create conscious-sufficient latency nonlocal critical mass. Where there used to not be enough proximally-local humans as the atomic units to initiate bottom-up growth, its collapse into a monopole has opened up the entire Globe’s conscious-human cybernetic locality potential. An example of this is the invention of .git version management control and the GNU computer system that human teams around the world could finally build together decentrally.
A trade-off of unlocking the Global cybernetic locality potential is more noise in the system. A way to mitigate this friction is to use the most fastidious documenting systems available to restrict the global canon into novel commonalities only. The “industrial precedent” evolution of patents developed at the vitalia.city district genesis at Próspera, focused on a permissionless business model for software patents, could offer the procedural upgrade that standards like EIP need to first power-law scale (“log scale”) in order to exponentially scale (“base scale”). Combine industrial precedent within a more speculative Github .git library system for a wider, but still regimented, scale aperture.
When the global of a local with dominant control decay rate overpowers its negative entropy, the critical mass phases into a dead-weight transaction cost. Jurisprudence processes such as ‘precedence’ and ‘noting-up’ are generalizable information technology that help garbage collect and rejuvenate our dominant gardens.
I’ve learned by writing this that the cybernetic monopole moment has opened the floodgates of horizontal and diagonal jurisdiction interdata and extitutionality. This flooding period will not last long, but it will offer much useful work energy until we reach equilibrium. Legal engineering offers a jurisprudential way to build control systems within the monopole moment. Legal engineering is a way we can harness the useful work we are being offered. Charter cities are sandboxes as well as physical dipole specializations, DAOs are cybernetic monopole native organizations.
A globallocal is possible, such as robots manufacturing globally created CAD designs within the last-mile cost radius; physical is dipole proximity but cybernetic is dipole proximity and monopole moment.
Let us not forget, however, it is still humans all the way down: though family dynamics asymmetrically scale, having happy families is the only way to have healthy people and to have healthy civilizations. Humans as atomic elements need to have intimate social relationships with other humans in order to scale up Global trust in humanity; only then can we achieve full-aperture neighborliness. Like alchemizing gold out of carbon, the journey is long.
A final thought on the sacred after overhearing Robin Hanson’s roundtable with Vitalians earlier this month. The profane economy is entropy but the sacred economy is -(entropy). In a sacred economy, sunk costs – martyrdom, sacrifice – adds value to the appraisal. This way, a spouse getting terminal cancer and their partner stays loyal to them until the end is a highly valuable marriage because of the sunk costs. A profane-only economy civilization in the face of our mortality crumbles to nihilism and collapse but a sacred-also economy optimizes for grandchildren. Giving the sacred economy paramountcy over the profane economy, if conflict, would likely mitigate polycentric violence. Yet the modern Global ‘fiat’ economy is far too frequently preoccupied with accruing profane wealth to be able to allow the sacred economy enough expression to play its Infinite game alongside.
To be Chancery, not just Supreme. The same coin perhaps, but each side is weighed in balance with the other along the narrow path.