My interviewer Remington is a high school student. He said he’s learned vastly more by helping to launch BF news than by anything school has made him study.
Tag: news
Bitcoin – Because Everyone Has to Say Something
Whatever it is, whatever it will become, Bitcoin is pretty cool.
I’ve enjoyed watching it get a lot of attention, and draw attention to big ideas and questions like the role of money, decentralized orders, radical choice, polycentrism and the digital future. It’s also a little depressing to read the flow of articles on Bitcoin coming from most journalistic outlets. Not because they like or dislike Bitcoin, or because they describe it correctly or incorrectly, but because their grasp on the economics of money, from its origin to its uses and history, is shaky at best.
No one need be an expert on economics – especially the conceptually difficult arena of monetary economics – to write for a newspaper. But when you are writing about money, and confidently, it behooves you to dig in and discover what this money is all about. Rothbard’s famous quote applies here,
“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
Thankfully, none of this economic ignorance matters as it regards Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin doesn’t care what journalists think. The always quotable and insightful Jeff Tucker summed up why very nicely in a recent Facebook post,
“It’s so strange how this how thing is becoming some kind of fight between pro- or anti-BTC, as if this were some policy thing. It’s not. This is a market technology. It either works or it doesn’t. It’s like being for or against email, for or against online media, for or against Skype. I mean, if you don’t like it, don’t use it. Whether it succeeds or not is up to any intellectual; it’s up to the market.”
The downside of journalistic economic ignorance is that it may result in confused ideas among the public, and therefore create incentives for confused policy from lawmakers. I’ve heard journalists claim that government guarantees are the best and only sign of a sound money, (because, you know, hyperinflation never happens) and that the core purpose of a currency is price stability (because, of course, markets have been traumatized when trying to adjust to the rapidly falling prices in, say, the tech industry). It’s sad to see such silliness, but it’s also great to see discussion everywhere about what makes a currency.
It can be helpful to compare money to language. Both are spontaneous orders. Both are tools that facilitate exchanges between people. Both are wholly dependent on the individuals involved for their value and evolution; yet neither can be controlled by any one person. Try introducing a new language, or even a single new word to an existing language. Not easy. Yet anyone is free to try, and new words emerge constantly. They stick around only so long as they are perceived as valuable ways to facilitate an exchange of ideas. It doesn’t really matter what experts think makes for a good word or language. It matters what actually takes root in the world – a world where people face trade-offs and try to get the most value for the least effort.
Bitcoin kind of reminds me (as an admitted computer ignoramus) of programming languages. Computer programmers have developed and become conversant in all kinds of languages that mean almost nothing to me. These emerged out of nowhere in a relatively short period of time. Some lived, some died. Today, they provide an incredibly valuable function that serves not just programmers, but all of us, even though almost none of us speak the language. Perhaps Bitcoin could evolve similarly.
Even if never the dominant currency “above the table” so to speak, it may find a powerful place in behind the scenes markets among niche experts, just as programming languages do all around us. Maybe you or your friend or your uncle will never own Bitcoins – none of you probably write computer code either – but perhaps the crypto currency will be busy at work facilitating exchanges among many market participants you interact with.
I don’t really know, and I’d rather spectate than speculate. It’s pretty fun to watch, and it’s even better to hear the chatter about a lot of topics I never expected to see in the public conversation. Money is a mysterious and complex thing. It’s prudent in such matters to refrain from confident proclamations. I’m as likely to buy-in to someone’s prediction of Bitcoin as I am their prediction of which words will fall in and out of use in the next ten years.
What the News Could Never Do
I love Facebook. It’s a great way to connect to people I enjoy communicating with, see new ideas and articles, enjoy social diversions during the day (when you work from home it can replace the water cooler), and of course keep up on memes and videos of cats. But there is another function of Facebook I didn’t foresee that has become increasingly valuable. It does something news outlets can’t do – respond to exactly what I’m interested in at the moment and give me stories about it.
A few weeks back I realized it had been some time since I read or watched anything about new advances in science and technology. I remembered the excitement I got as a kid looking at Popular Mechanics magazine, and wanted to get that thrill again by hearing the coolest stuff now within the realm of possibility. I could have gone to any number of news outlets and browsed the technology section. I could have gone to tech specific magazines or websites. But these don’t always have articles on the most cutting edge stuff, and if I picked the wrong day, I might get a story about a new app instead. It would require some browsing. I could use Google, but Google is best when you know what you want to find, and I was looking for something I didn’t know existed. In short, I needed to be inspired by the creative power of mankind, and I had no where to turn for a quick overview.
I posted an open-ended question on Facebook: What are the coolest things going on in science and technology? Within a few hours I had dozens of amazing articles, video clips, pictures and stories of everything from 3D burrito printers, to graphene smart phones, to particle accelerators, etc. ad nauseam. Not only that, the responses were from people who knew something about me and could add some humor, flavor, or insight no other outlet could. There was even some friendly competition over what was truly the best innovation going. I’ve only read through half of the things posted thus far, but I still go back to the thread from time to time to be further amazed.
News outlets and periodicals can produce great stories. The problem is, they have no way of knowing when I’m going to be in the mood for the latest trend in herb gardening or the latest adventure sport. They publish such pieces, but most of the time my interests don’t intersect with their schedule. Sure, they archive them, but there’s no good way for me to access the info unless I already know exactly what I want to read. Enter Facebook. Now it’s like every one of my digital acquaintances work for me. I can outsource the article reading, categorizing and rating to a few thousand people I find interesting. They enjoy the chance to share their interests, and I get the benefit of good stories without wading through all the other fluff. I do the same for them.
I’ve got a lot more to say about Facebook, but I’ll save it for another post. I am of the opinion that we haven’t fully internalized how radical is the shift in social order wrought by Facebook. We have yet to appreciate the tremendous impact on every facet of social and commercial life. The layers are many.
Why I Don’t Follow the News
I rarely follow the news and almost never get it direct from news sources. What news I’m up on tends to find it’s way to me through filters – blogs I read, emails from friends, Facebook posts and hearsay.
This is not because of laziness or a lack of concern with being informed. Indeed, I love information, trivia, knowledge and truth. However, I found that keeping up on the news, especially reading papers and watching news shows, significantly diminished my quality of life. It made me angry and depressed more often than not.
This is not because the cold, hard realities of terrestrial life are simply all bad news. In fact every day billions of people are voluntarily, peacefully co-operating and being made better off through trade, commerce, community, and friendship. Millions of things are invented, quality of life improves, the creative destruction of the market (in both goods and ideas) brings about untold beauty and opportunity. Indeed, with a little bit of reflection it is not hard to see how vast, mysterious and awesome life is, even in the smallest tasks of a typical day.
But, probably for rational reasons, the news chooses to focus on those relatively few happenings between relatively few people that are violent, coercive and troubling. A disproportionate amount of space is devoted to that tiny sliver of our individual and societal existence, politics, and nearly all the rest to all the other dangers and troubles in the universe.
It’s not an accurate picture of the world, nor is it particularly useful. I think it was for this reason (and perhaps the generally bad quality of the writing) that C.S. Lewis warned against frequent newspaper reading. Mark Twain (I think) said “Those who don’t read the news are uninformed. Those who do are misinformed”.
Does this mean we turn a blind eye to reality so that we can be happy? Isn’t that a form of escapism? Frankly, I think that’s the wrong question.
There is a phenomenal scene in The Silver Chair, part of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, where a group of children and a kindly swamp creature are trapped in an underground world by an evil queen. The queen has them under a sort of spell and she is trying to convince them that there is no outside world, but only the cavernous underworld. When they object and say that the outside world is real she asks them what it is like. They tell her it has a sun, which is much like the lights in the cave only bigger and brighter; it has lions which are much like the cats of the underworld only grander and more fierce, and so on.
The queen remarks that there is no outside world at all, but that the children have simply taken things from the real world and pretended they were bigger and better. It was a mere game, and the reality was in the caves all along.
The group is on the verge of being persuaded of this sad state when the humble swamp creature proclaims that even if this were true, what would it say about the real world? What kind of world would it be if children could easily create a make-believe world that was so much better? Even if the outside world is make-believe, he declares, it’s so much preferable to the “real world” underground that he’d rather go on pretending. At that the spell was broken, hope restored and the deceptive queen’s power rendered inert.
It is more than a mere cliche to say that perception is reality. Expectation is also reality. Believing a better world is real and possible makes this world better, if for no other reason than that positive, optimistic people are more pleasant to be around.
The evidence also supports optimism. Who could ever have predicted the kinds of technologies and opportunities we have available today even just 50 or 100 years ago? The iPhone alone is jam packed with capabilities that were the stuff of sci-fi even a decade ago.
Why then do we listen to the news when it constantly reports on the fearful side of the present and future? That is only one view of reality. It’s a tiny slice of all that is, and a very unrepresentative slice at that. If a human can only take in so much of reality at once, why would I focus on the negative in a sea of positive?
I’d rather create my own reality – a powerful, free, beautiful one – than get angry about the false reality portrayed by the news. If that’s escapism, so be it. Escaping something bad into something better is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a choice to perceive and embrace reality in a more useful, constructive manner.
It doesn’t mean injustice doesn’t exist, or that there are not things I am hoping and fighting to change – not least of which are in myself. It just means there are better ways of doing it and thinking about it.
Instead of letting it be selected for me, I choose each day what bits of news I take in about the vast and wondrous universe. It beats the hell out of the paper.