A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet

by Charles Hugh Smith

What every human wants is fairness, a chance to belong that offers everyone opportunities to get ahead by our own merit and a say when decisions are made. Even before the global upheavals, our system was failing—it wasn’t fair at all. Now that it’s unraveling, it’s time for a new arrangement that’s actually sustainable on our resource-depleted planet that doesn’t favor wealthy insiders. Those gorging on inequality will never accept reforms that strip away their unearned privileges, and so the only practical way forward is a Hacker’s Teleology. What’s a Hacker’s Teleology? A hack is a workaround in a kludgy, broken system—a new way of connecting the dots. Teleology means the destination we end up reaching because that’s where the dots lead. In this book I connect the dots of my own life experiences to show how a sustainably fair way of organizing human activity would work. In telling my story, I’m also telling our story, because we all share our limited-resources world and the same aspirations for fairness, belonging, getting ahead and a say in our future. So let’s get started on an arrangement that actually works for all of us—and our world.

158 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 5, 2020

Reviews

[Matt Carpenter · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot to like in this book. It explains much of the modern financial system in terms easy to understand. His explanation of the fractional reserve system is reminiscent (but not precisely the same) as Libertarian beliefs. His decentralist perspective is similar to that of Nicholas Taleb, and he mentions Taleb's book, AntiFragile several times. Overall, his analysis is worth 5-stars.

He is to be commended for recommending a solution, known by the acronym CLIME (Community Labor Integrated Money Economy), a crypto-currency that values work that benefits society rather than pure profit. It is hard to get excited about, as it would require many people to get on board with the program, but the time may come when these methods are necessary. This portion of the book is the weakest point, but the author gives greater detail to it in a previous book, "A Radically Beneficial World."

It sounds much like a modern distributist (look it up) critique of the modern economic system. I want to believe his solution would work, but I'm not as hopeful as he is, due to my observation of human nature. Nevertheless, I will continue reading his work and am glad to have happened upon this book.