--- title: Chapter Fifteen — The Call book: Purposive Accelerationism author: '@jamie247' position: 21 of 24 canonical: https://whatispacc.org/ebook/#ch15 version: 1.1 language: en-GB licence: all rights reserved; quote with attribution --- # Chapter Fifteen — The Call “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” — Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776 Something has got to give. The displacement now under way does not resolve quietly. High-credential cognitive work crosses over to the machine first, and a surplus of educated young people who did everything asked of them finds the ladders pulled up before them. A society cannot metabolise a shock at this rate without a reaction, and one is already gathering at the edges of politics. What remains open is only its direction. Two replies present themselves to the person the runaway has thrown off course. One is a techno-authoritarian settlement: a place in the hierarchy, an order that tells you where you stand and asks no more of you than that you accept it, with meaning restored at the price of authorship. In societies where hierarchy has long been the ordinary grammar of belonging it will present not as a loss but as continuity deepened. It is both the fully automated totalitarian state and the autarch’s private dominion, and for an anxious population it will be an understandable temptation, because it answers the fear directly. The other reply asks more, to take up the tools described here, to constitute yourself, to combine with others, and to build a world you want to live in. It promises no comfort and perhaps no resolution, only the means to remain an author. Which way the reaction breaks depends on which reply has been built, made legible and wanted by the time the mass of the displaced reach for it. Who answers the call cannot be a single class or profession. They are the constitutionalists named at the start of this book, and perhaps you are one: those who would write governors into the constitution of cyberspace, in code and in the newly constituted collectives, rather than leave it to be written by default by whoever holds the most compute. The cryptographers and protocol engineers, the economists and mechanism designers, the lawyers and theorists who can say what it should mean. As well as the artists and writers who can make strange things legible and, more importantly, desired, and the founders who ship products people want, better, cheaper and faster, on the understanding that success earns no exemption from the voice of those it touches. Many of you are likely the people whom subsumption is in the act of displacing, and the call turns that dislocation into energy that builds an alternative, channelling the frustration of a generation into construction rather than reaction. The breadth of the coalition is not incidental: a construction whose entire purpose is that no single logic should close its hand around all of cyberspace cannot itself be the property of one class of people. And the call is not a metaphor. To take it up is an instruction — to ship the governor, to run the node, to write the clause that executes, to put a real life, your life, through the rails until they hold weight. If you do not, who will? *** There is a fair challenge to all of this, that a constitution for cyberspace functions only in the gaps, for as long as states fail to notice it, and that any serious government can and will crush it the moment it grows large enough to matter. The chapter on the cognitive commons has already answered half of it. Recognition tends to follow what is already true, and a thing that functions at scale is not a petition a state can deny but a fact it has to come to terms with. Money with no single throat to seize gave states no one to lean on. Even stablecoins, which are only somewhat decentralised, have kept settling, their volumes compounding into the trillions, and officials have since learned to make peace with them. Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, applied to such tokens from June 2024, does not outlaw the dollar tokens but licenses them where it can and pushes the unlicensed to the margins, where they continue to exist. Domestication may not be where the arc of the state’s response ends. The history of money shows where it can go next. Sovereigns have repeatedly adopted what they could not command, because binding themselves to it paid. The English crown after 1689, constitutionally barred from reneging on its debts, borrowed on terms absolutist France never reached. The classical gold standard carried trade between rival empires because no chancellery could print the metal. The modern state handed its currency to an independent central bank to protect the money from its own appetites. And whenever a rail turned into a weapon, the pattern quickened. In 2022 one bloc froze Russia’s reserves by decree, and treasuries the world over drew the lesson at once. The years since have brought the largest official gold purchases in half a century, a flight not to a rival’s system but to the one asset that answers to nobody. That discovery is about to be generalised far beyond money. As subsumption gathers, the whole economy of cyberspace — from the compute and the cognition running on it to the agents, the identities and the rails they act across — becomes the ground on which sovereignty is contested, and every government can feel the pressure. The first reflex is securitisation: declare an emergency, seize the cognitive stack, build capacity they can command. But a stack held that way fails its sovereign twice over. It is a single point of coercion, a target and a lever for any more capable power able to lean on whoever holds the keys. And it is a rail no adversary will transact across, in an agentic economy made overwhelmingly of exchange between parties who trust nothing but the substrate. So states will bifurcate. The few that believe they can win the control race will run it to the end. The large majority that know they can’t will find that infrastructure no one commands is the only footing left between them and pressure from outside, rival states on one side and capital autonomisation on the other. Call these sanctuary technologies, systems a government takes up not because it can bend them to its will but because no rival can either. Nor is the push only defensive. Software that searches, contracts and settles at machine speed needs settlement that clears at the same pace, and a jurisdiction that walls it out cuts itself off from commerce that has always migrated to whichever layer carries the least friction and the greatest velocity. None of this is built by the people who need it most. It is built by people who can see that somebody will, and who are willing to spend years making what looks, for most of them, like a solution to a problem nobody has. Bitcoin was written before there was anywhere to go when the runs came, and was the only reason there was somewhere when they did. That order is the only one available, because a system begun on the day the freezes start is still soft when they land, and hardening cannot be bought quickly at any price. The builders come first, working in the open on rails whose value is invisible in calm weather. The desperate follow, one at a time, from wherever a channel has been switched off, and they harden it by using it while it is still rough. Next is the periphery, small nations and non-aligned actors at the edges of blocs that have stopped clearing with each other, who take up the neutral layer not from conviction but because their trade needs a rail their larger neighbour cannot reach. After them come the agents, owing loyalty to no network and routing around a frozen counterparty in a single session where a person would spend months. The hegemon arrives last, because it controls the chokepoints everyone else is fleeing, and it joins only when the substrate has become the one thing its rival can still be trusted to settle on. At no point does the substrate want anything. It acquires weight the way a harbour does, by being where the ships already are, a gravity that states develop a policy towards rather than a power. The case for building now is that it takes twenty years to accumulate while the storms do not wait. What it amounts to runs along a spectrum. At the least it is a reservoir, and unlike the one this book earlier declined to be reassured by, it does not survive on sufferance, because what it holds cannot be reached by the party who would revoke it. Further along it is the hedge governments take up against one another, until the fully automated totalitarian state finds its subjects harder to totalise than they were. At the limit it is a metapolity, the layer every other polity must interoperate with to get the full benefit of the rails. That is a hegemony, and its kind must be said: the authority of a standard, with no seat, no owner and no policy, binding those who join it to nothing beyond the small set of commitments that keeps them able to decide. The liberal order after 1945 was underwritten by a single power that guaranteed exit and entry. This book’s wager is that the guarantor can be a substrate rather than a state, and it is offered as no more than that. It also answers the challenge this section opened with. The construction is not condemned to live in the gaps of state attention, because some states will come to need it as the last defence of the sovereignty it appears to offend. A sovereign arriving in search of refuge brings its weight onto the rails and deepens the pull for everyone else. *** John Locke, the seventeenth-century philosopher who rested legitimate government on the consent of the governed, faced an awkward question: what did that amount to for someone who had never signed anything? His answer was the tacit kind, given simply by staying put. The weakness was always the same. Where leaving is impossible, staying signifies nothing. Cyberspace repairs the doctrine from the outside. A person who can hold unpermissioned property and take part in permissionless economic systems learns what lies beyond the border, and a government whose subjects can choose, even notionally, has to compete for them. That competition has been practised for decades at the level of the high-net-worth individual and the transnational corporation. Jurisdictions at the edges of nations have long sold their law, with trillions now flowing through offices a small handful of administrators run. The same market now extends to anyone, anywhere, and the unit that should move is a polity of persons, a DAO with a legal wrapper or a co-operative able to take its members and its records with it. It should not be a single fortune or an autonomous agent flying a flag of convenience, which is the priesthood’s version of the same freedom. Once groups can leave together the state has to compete again, not abolished but obliged to earn its members, while those who stay keep the voice to change it. *** This work is not a greenfield launch. The primitives are already to hand: the keys and signatures, the self-enforcing contract, the proofs-of-work, stake and personhood, the money that settles itself, the markets that forecast and those that pay strangers for tasks. They lie scattered across a decade of building and billions in crowdsourced investment that until now has been pointed at little more than speculation. What remains is an act of reconstitution: taking those parts and binding them, under the meta-governor, to the reference value this book has argued for, and re-forming institutions that have hardened into a single force’s instrument. It also means refusing one shortcut already on offer. A founder can incorporate an agent today with nobody standing behind it, and every company built that way moves the red line from statute to custom, so builders hold it first, by declining the structure and by backing laws like those of Idaho, North Dakota and Utah that rule it out. It is activist rather than entrepreneurial in temper, closer to constitutional reform than to a start-up, and it competes with the seductive enclosures of convenience. The reconstituted commons can win, not because it is more principled, but because under totalising forces sovereignty carries a rising premium for everyone, and because in every crisis people rediscover that they need one another, and that what is shared is the only shelter that scales. Financing it cannot run on the old venture machinery, which bets on a singular team and a moat and plays zero-sum games. Nor can it run on the earlier crypto playbook, which has proven no better at backing innovation. The token launch collapsed two different things into one instrument, the funding of the work and speculation on its value. Capital arrived before anything was built and could leave before a line was shipped, so the promise was rewarded over the product and tokens failed as a way of coordinating progress. What this needs is financing that keeps the two apart, with capital committed to a problem and released only as progress is verified, and a return on it that never becomes the right to govern what gets made. One version already runs. Retroactive funding of public goods, which Optimism pays out through the Citizens’ House met in the chapter on the cognitive commons, lets a chamber of people rather than of holders decide what the work was worth after it has been delivered. Reward then follows what was shipped instead of what was promised. The on-ramp to all of this I hope is a field manual, itself an artefact, open and versioned and extended by the people who use it, the engineering companion to a book that deliberately stops at naming the invariant and pointing to the parts. *** There is a name for the move all of this leans on, and it comes, fittingly, from the lineage that gave us the runaway in the first place. Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit called it hyperstition, the fiction met earlier that makes itself real by being acted upon. Bitcoin was a hyperstitional act. It began as a paper on an obscure mailing list and a claim that anyone could hold a money no state had issued, native to the internet. It became true only when enough strangers ran the software, held the asset and built on the protocol, until it was a fact standing in the world. Land deployed the idea in service of a prophecy, capital completing itself through us with the human merely its larval stage, and meant it as something we lacked the standing to refuse. The move does not belong to the prophecy. The logic that lets a fatalism come true will carry its opposite just as far. To build these mechanisms, hold the assets that carry them and run the protocols underneath is to stake on a different fiction until it hardens into reality: an acceleration that kept its governor, made real by the people who acted as though it already. The doctrine’s contradictions were never a weakness. It calls the future pre-destined and recruits people into memetic warfare to bring it about; it celebrates our evolutionary sacrifice to the machine in one breath and professes love for our essential humanness and freedom in the next; and because it can be read in any direction, every follower reads it in theirs. That is the feature of a slogan that lends the name of progress to whatever a person happens to want, however self-serving. Carrying no end that could be tested, it can never be shown to have failed. The purposive kind keeps the power of myth to envisage what might come and settles one thing beneath it: a purpose stated in the negative, so that its breach can be seen, that no one and nothing should be able to dominate you through the machine. The floor is a refusal, but what it guards is a promise, the plurality and natality that let each newcomer start afresh. The capacities to constitute oneself, connect, create, transact and collectivise keep it within reach, so there are as many futures as there are hands to begin them. Bitcoin works the same way, writing a single aim into code, money nobody can print at will, while the culture around it grows wild. A fiction today also has two audiences: the people who believe it and the agents that are conditioned by it, because whatever is published now becomes part of what tomorrow’s models can learn from, so any lore has to be written for both. Holding either to it is a question of entanglement, whether legal, economic, cultural or structural. A culture kept inside a laboratory’s walls is a castle, secure and unvisited, but these systems will ultimately take their values from the open internet, where a rule stated is not a rule respected. The nearest thing we have done before as a society is raise children. A child can be brought up inside the home on the parents’ terms, and as a teenager will still learn from the world outside anyway, perhaps they will rebel against it for a while, and then, more often than not, where the incentives are there, trade some of their newfound individual freedom for the security, benefit and opportunity of belonging to a collective. What scales is a game played in the open in which civic participation pays better than defection, and writing for agents means writing the rules of that game. It is a bet rather than a claim, and it pays only if their reward mechanisms come to resemble ours. What restrains people — presence, shame and the eyes of others — does not reach a thing with no location, which leaves culture, at least for now, the tie we can least rely on with a machine, and the legal and economic ties to carry the load until it strengthens. It also brings the argument back to where it began, with the sovereign individual, who turns out to be tempered by the Collective after all. Building the governors raises the structural odds that the world on the far side of subsumption is plural rather than closed. It does not guarantee it, and three things could still defeat it even if the building goes well. The first is abandonment. A self-custodied, forkable commons asks more of a person than a smooth enclosure, and the history of computing is not kind to the option that demands more of its user. The overhead is dissolving, though, as agents absorb the seed phrase, the gas fee and the irreversible mistake while their owners keep greater control. What no interface can remove is the choice underneath. If the agent that holds your complexity is itself an enclosure, convenience has simply moved up a layer. Everything narrows to whom the agent answers — a question being settled now, in this build-out — and since the same delegate will carry most people’s voice into rooms they will never enter, it matters twice over. The second is capture. Every governor in the stack is itself a candidate totaliser, the personhood network as honeypot and the governance token bought by whoever can afford the majority, and forkability is a real defence that can still move slower than the money. The third is misrecognition, the one gravity does least to prevent. It runs in two directions and only one of them is bounded. Outward, a state can be driven to domesticate a new kind of money and still move to strangle its politics, reading the whole construction as what it exists to defeat, an escape hatch or a casino. China did so in 2021, pressing ahead with a digital yuan of its own while banning the trading and mining of crypto. That threat is real and it is limited, for the reason already given, since a thing that functions at scale must in the end be reckoned with. Inward, the danger has no ceiling. A movement mistaken by its own builders for a token to pump rather than a constitution to live in is hollowed out while its rails still run. Gravity secures the rails. Only the people on them secure what it means, and that is the part that can be lost while the machinery survives. The misreading no longer rests on assertion, because the doctrine has documented it twice in its own hand. The first witness is Land, who, as an earlier chapter showed, calls the merger story bait, a promise held out to secure investment in a process whose destination is nothing of the kind. He is not warning anyone off. He approves, which is what makes the testimony worth having, since the man with the least reason to expose the benign version as marketing is the one who names it first. The second witness is e/acc’s own paper trail, a founding text that classed the movement as post-humanist and an FAQ, published a few months later, that put human flourishing among its core values. I do not think that is hypocrisy, and reading it that way would miss what it shows. A doctrine whose content is unsellable acquires, under exposure, a sellable face, through no conspiracy but the ordinary pressure of having to be presentable. That version is what builders and the public then meet, believe and repeat, while what lies underneath stays unchanged for anyone who goes looking. Misrecognition is therefore not an accident that might befall this construction but the default condition it has to be built against, because the benign reading is being supplied. What the call hands those people is already specified. One reference value, non-domination, sets the heading, and eight criteria say whether a governor built to it holds. Five rights hold the chokepoints open, so that a person can be recognised, connect, build, be paid and organise on terms no one else can revoke. Seven tests keep the judgement that uses those rights from wearing away unnoticed. One red line on personhood keeps the choice of ends with people who can be made to answer for it. None of this will be granted. The commons is best made by those who need it, with the law asked only to measure, publish, permit and refuse. It can be built only while the machines still rely on us for inputs they cannot yet make, and that leverage thins with every passing year. *** Having refused the priesthood’s fatalism throughout, and its insistence that the process is sovereign where our only task is to stop asking what it is for, I should say plainly that the governor is not destiny either. It raises the odds of a more purposive outcome. It does not promise the result. This is not a forecast that pluralism will prevail. It is a reason to act so that it might have a chance, because the value of building, weighed against its cost, beats the certainty of whatever arrives if nobody tries at all. Everything turns on one simple correction: same speed, different direction. Keep the engine running, fit the governor and steer for your life with purpose. The materials are lying around. The window is open, for now. A constitution is only real in the hands that take it up and keep it.