00:00So I want to talk about Trashtag, because it very much aligns with the concept that I call social proof of work. Trashtag is basically this hashtag, or a meme, where people take pictures of a trash filled area and they clean it up and take another picture and post the before and after for internet points. And this is wonderful, and it very much reminds me of a concept that I refer to as social proof of work. Social proof of work is an alternative to the motivation provided by the profit incentive. Generally in this society people do things because they want to make money, but the profit incentive does not motivate for all types of action. There's some things that, while most people want to see them done, they're not really willing to pay for them individually. Why would you personally pay your own money to clean a park if right after finishing someone can just go and take a [ __ ] in it?

00:47I mean, you're willing to pay to clean your own house because it's yours and you can protect it from other people. But if you want to see a shared public space clean, that's not exactly something that can be capitalized upon because most people aren't willing to pay for it, there's no way to monetize it. And so generally the notion is that public spaces are meant to be maintained by governments, by the use of pooled resources, basically by the threat of violence. We collect taxes and a central institution is supposed to perform actions the profit incentive doesn't motivate. But obviously if we're seeing so many instances of Trashtag, the government is not doing its job maintaining those public spaces. And this recent hashtag is a perfect example of how you would create an alternative reward for things we collectively wish to see be done, that behaves different than the profit incentive.

01:35Because capitalism revolves around person-to-person transactions. You can't engage in a transaction with society as a whole. You can only motivate an individual to do a task if a singular person has enough resources to reward them. And unless I'm including entities like corporations because they claim to have corporate personhood, but whether it's a corporate entity or a human person, they have to be willing to part with their own money to see a task performed. So really what is incentivized is mainly actions that benefit the individual. But there are a lot of actions which we wish to see be done but we wouldn't personally pay our own money for. So there's a difference between the type of work that needs to be done and the type of work that is incentivized by the profit incentive.

02:23People may inherently want something to happen but it's not something they are personally willing to spend their money on. And then when we think about work, we think about jobs. Everyone is supposed to have a job, and through that job they perform work, it's all about who has enough money to tell you what to do. But then people look around and they say there are no jobs, and at the same time they say there's a ton of work that needs to be done. You know, there's trash to be picked up, houses to build, graffiti to clean, trees to plant, lives to improve. And capitalism drives action, but it drives a certain type of action, and that type of action is pro-individual, it's not a pro-social kind of action. So in reaction what we try to do is we try to have this system of taxes, where we say we are banding together and we are forming a government to perform these actions that the markets won't do.

03:10But then we have these incredibly inefficient and ineffective programs that are run by the government. The problem is that because these programs are centralized and have no competitive pressures to perform better like markets have, they become inefficient and are manipulated by those who run them. But the problem is that the markets themselves don't react to the needs of the people as a whole in the first place, they react to those individuals who already have money. There are certain things that we may want but for one reason or another we are unwilling to individually pay for them, unless we believe everyone is going to be forced to pay for them as well. And so the notion instead is that we pool our resources in some way, but then we get these very poor inefficient programs that no one ends up being really happy with.

03:57Certainly at a smaller scale, like the scale of Scandinavian countries where they're only as big as a smaller US state, they can actually pull it off because it's far less people. But once you get up to this 300 million mark like the US, it just doesn't seem to work. I mean you can't really argue that the DMV or veterans benefits are run well. If people just don't seem to be willing to accept that, people seem to just want to give more and more and more power to the federal government no matter how ineffective and corrupt it is. They don't seem to be willing to accept that you can't just compare a 300 million person country to a 5 million person country, they're just not comparable because there's this factor of scalability.

04:45So this Trashtag, to me, illustrates a better way to motivate action, and I call it social proof of work. And that, there is work that needs to be done, there's work that people collectively desire to be done, and it can be rewarded by these points. But these rewards that we are giving people for doing socially desirable work is just upvotes or attention, but in this is the seed of something that can be so much more powerful. The notion is that you have this collective of people who are all agreeing that they want trash to be removed from public spaces, and obviously with all the money we pay taxes for it's not being done by public utilities, so what we do is we upvote all these people who provide proof that they are performing these tasks. And inherently we're more willing to give our upvotes to them because we have infinite upvotes to give, unlike money which is a finite resource. So why don't we build upon that?

05:34Why don't we have some sort of collective record where we are constantly establishing what we want to see, and from that record is actually paying out a real token that has inherent value? And I call this social proof of work because what you're doing is you are earning your position in society by proving work. It's kind of a combination between socialism and the profit incentive, built upon the concept behind cryptocurrency called proof of work. And the idea is that it would be decentralized and quantified via a public ledger, so rather than these inefficient centralized systems you have this distributed ledger that defines what people want to see happen. And because individuals are fulfilling the desires of the collective they should get paid out from this ledger for that work. So the idea of proof of work behind cryptocurrency is that a processor is doing some task to secure a blockchain, and therefore the person running that processor should be rewarded for their computational power that they're distributing to the ledger.

06:23So why isn't that notion apply to collective want? If you have this record of things that people want to see done, why can't people prove their value to society by doing work that people want to see be done? Of course you need to have a way to secure this, and you need to have a way to prove it and establish the credibility of the claims that are being made. Yes, but why can you not take that into the real world? I know it may seem difficult to analogize a hash function to an action in the real world, but I think it's doable, and if you've been watching my last few videos it's something that I've put a lot of thought into. I don't view it as an uncertain thing, I just view it as we can do it if only the idea were to get into enough people's minds.

07:12The thing about the internet is it allows us to collectively express our wants about what we would like to see in society. But then back in the real world, individuals can take actions to achieve those collective goals. And then the internet can again collectively validate those actions taken by those individuals and then collectively reward them for their actions with some sort of distribution of a token that represents some meter of influence in society. Because basically what you're saying is these individuals are the ones who are most contributing to what we collectively want to see society be like. And I know that after this Trashtag thing there will probably be some person who makes some sort of app for this, and that is great, but I really mean it in a way far beyond that. I mean it in a fundamental new framework of how we organize society way. I mean it. And if you have to run a company that pays individuals to maintain the software behind this, that is entirely missing the point.

08:00I mean it in that this is the ultimate potential of what the internet could be. It's that all these things we wish to be done in society can be very effectively measured and metered in this way, but instead we just use the internet to share content that keeps us entertained. So the idea is that there has to be some real fundamental reward like money that you get as a result of your actions that are being validated by the community. That if there was a reward that was equal in value to money for doing socially beneficial tasks, then you would have a counterpoint to money. Because money rewards the individual for taking care of themselves or for doing things for themselves, but obviously we see these sort of network effects where flaws in the profit incentive cause less than pro-social industries to arise.

08:48I mean [ __ ] look at for-profit prisons, or for-profit military companies, or look at how insurance companies seem to just [ __ ] over everyone who pays them for their service. So if there is a way to interact with the needs and the wants of the collective as a whole and reward individuals for that, we could dramatically transform society. And it sort of boggles my mind that this is not a common idea yet. I think there is something wrong with the idea that every idea of action in this society that you want to take needs to be filtered through the profit incentive. Yeah you could have a nonprofit organization, but fundamentally it will be weaker than a profit based organization, because a profit based organization can build upon itself by making profit. Therefore the organizations that ruthlessly pursue profit are the ones that are the most successful, and the idea that you can pursue action in the society, that you can pursue collective action in a way that does not involve money, is insane.

09:36It is ludicrous to think that you can, at least as far as things stand now. And a lot of people think that I should take these ideas and start a company or start a non-profit. To me, that is completely missing the point. I really strongly believe that this needs to be a fundamental counterpoint to profit itself, that it's an update to our socio-economic system. The profit incentive is so ingrained into our minds that we are so obsessed with it that it prevents our actions in the aim of collective good. But this Trashtag thing is the perfect example of a counterpoint to motivating action that we want to see. This is the collective rewarding individuals for doing social good. Now the problem is that it's just internet points, they have no real value.

10:25But if you really have a system that would instead take the whole Trashtag concept and reward with a token that has real fundamental value, that is equal in value to money, then you could [ __ ] reinvent society. I swear to [ __ ] god, it is insane that people do not see this. The fact that people are so tied to money as a concept is honestly embarrassing for us as a society, and it's just idiotic on so many levels. I feel like if there are alien civilizations watching us they're just looking at our society and [ __ ] laughing. And it's so obvious that the profit incentive does not motivate for a certain class of actions. We try to correct for that by having these centralized organizations but they're so shitty. The argument that people on the right have about the inefficiencies of government is right, but their assumption that if you get rid of these governmental support systems that magically the profit incentive will suddenly work to fulfill these collective needs is equally stupid.

11:13No they won't. Centralized systems exist because there's no other way for those specific programs to exist yet, that does not mean they work well, and that does not mean there couldn't be decentralized systems that motivate for these collective needs better. There is a psychological aspect about what people are willing to pay their individually earned money on, and it is not for the greater good, because that is not the [ __ ] way that money works. Money is for the individual. If you want to have something that quantifies social good rather than individual good, then you need to have a token that represents collective good. So what do you think? Are these the ravings of a madman, or am I starting to make sense?

12:02I'm not saying let's start a revolution. I'm not saying let's snap half of people out of existence. I'm just saying that society can be done better. I'm just saying that capitalism has only been around for a few hundred years, and there is no reason to suggest that the best use of blockchain technology is to just sustain capitalism further. So do you think it can be done? Because I do, but only if people are willing to work towards that social good before there is a reward to encourage that action. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. [Music]