Mediaboss Marketing

Theres a video that pops up periodically on my YouTube feed. Its a conversation between rappers Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent bemoaning the fact that, compared to their generation, all modern hip-hop artists apparently sound the same. When a person decides to be themselves, they offer something no-one else can be, says 50 Cent. Yeah, cos once you be you who can be you but you? Snoop responds.

When the video was uploaded in October 2014, that may have broadly been true. But just a few years later it certainly isnt. In a world of audio deepfakes, its possible to train an A.I. to sound eerily similar to another person by feeding it an audio corpus consisting of hours of their spoken data. The results are unnervingly accurate.

Public figures like the rapper Jay-Z and the psychologist Jordan Peterson have already complained about people misappropriating their voices by creating audio deepfakes and then making them say silly things on the internet. Wake up, wrote Peterson. The sanctity of your voice, and your image, is at serious risk. Those are just the mischievous cases. In others,the results can tip over into un-nuanced criminality. In one 2019 incident, criminals used an audio deepfake to impersonate the voice of the CEO of an energy company and persuade an underling over the phone to urgently transfer $243,000 to a bank account.

Veritone, an A.I. company that creates smart tools for labeling media for the entertainment industry, is putting the audio deepfake power back in the hands (or, err, the throats) of those to whom it rightly belongs. This month, the company announced Marvel.ai, what company president Ryan Steelberg described to Digital Trends as a complete voice-as-a-service solution. For a fee, Veritone will build an A.I. model that sounds just like you (or, more likely, a famous person with an immediately recognizable voice), which can then be licensed out on loan like a high-tech version of Ariels voice-as-collateral bargain from The Little Mermaid.

Your voice is just as valuable as any other content or brand attribute that you have, said Steelberg. [Its on a level with] your name and likeness, your face, your signature, or a song youve written or piece of content youve created.

Certain individuals have, of course, long sold their voices in the form of recording commercials or voiceovers, singing songs, and countless other forms of monetization. But these endeavors all required the person to actually say the words. What Veritones solution promises to do is to make this individually scalable.

What if, for instance, it was possible for Kevin Hart to license his voice out to a luxury brand that could then use it to create personalized ads featuring the name of the viewer, the location of their nearest brick-and-mortar sales outlet, and the particular product they could be most likely to buy? Rather than spending literally days in the recording booth, A.I. could allow this to be done with little more (on Harts part, at least) than signing on the dotted line to agree for his voice likeness to be harnessed by said third party. While he was off shooting a movie, or doing a comedy tour, or taking a vacation, or even sleeping, his digital voice could be raking in the cash.

We can repurpose a lot, Steelberg explained, regarding the training process. People who are already speaking a ton, if theyre producing a podcast or in the media, theres a lot of data out there. We probably have a ton of it already if they happen to be a customer of ours.

What we find so fascinating about this new category of A.I. is the extensibility and the variability.

Steelberg said that the voice-as-a-service idea occurred to Veritone several years ago. However, at the time he was unconvinced that machine learning models were able to create the hyper-realistic synthetic voices he was looking for. This is especially important when it comes to voices we know intimately, even if weve never actually met the speaker in question. The results could be some kind of audible uncanny valley, with every wrong sound alerting listeners to the fact that theyre listening to a fake. But here in 2021 he is convinced that things have advanced to the point where this is now possible. Hence Marvel.ai.

Steelberg speaks in excited buzzwords about the massive potential of the technology, talking up its possible plethora of modalities of execution. Veritone can create models for text-to-speech. It can also build models for speech-to-speech, whereby a voice actor can drive a vocal performance by reading the words with suitable inflection and then having the finished voice overlaid at the end like a Snapchat filter. The company can also fingerprint each voice so it can tell if a piece of apparently real audio that pops up someplace was created using its technology.

The more you think about it youll literally come up with 50 more [possible use-cases], he said. What we find so fascinating about this new category of A.I. is the extensibility and the variability.

Consider some others. A famous athlete might be a god on the basketball court, but a devil when it comes to reading lines in a script in a way that sounds natural. Using Veritones technology, their part in video game cutscenes or reading an audio book of their memoir (which they may also not have written) could be performed by a voice actor, which is then digitally tweaked to sound like the athlete. As another possibility, a movie could be translated for other countries with the same actor voice now reading the lines in French, Mandarin, or any other one of a number of languages, even if the actor doesnt actually speak them.

A big question hanging over all of this, of course, is how members of the public are going to respond to it all. This is the tricky, unpredictable bit. Celebrities today must play a complex role: Both larger-than-life figures worthy of having their face plastered on billboards, and also relatable individuals who have relationship problems, tweet about watching TV in their pajamas, and make silly faces when they eat hot sauce.

What happens, then, when ads appear that not only feature a celebrity reading lines, but in cases when we know that said performer never actually said those lines, but rather had their voice programmatically utilized to bring us a targeted ad? Steelberg said that it is little different to a celebrity handing over control of their social media to a third party account manager. If we see Taylor Swift tweet, we know that its quite possibly not Taylor herself tapping out the message, especially if its an endorsement or piece of promotional content.

But voice is, in a very real way, different, precisely because its more personal. Especially if its accompanied by a degree of personalization, which is one of the use-cases that makes the most sense. The truth is that, to quote the screenwriter William Goldman, nobody knows what the public response will be precisely because nobody has done exactly this before.

Its going to run the spectrum, right? Steelberg said. [Some] people are going to say, Im going to use this tool a little bit to augment my day to help me save time. Others are going to say, full-blown, I want my voice everywhere to extend my brand, and Im going to license it out.

His best guess is that acceptance will be on a case-by-case basis. You need to be in tune with the reaction of your audience, and if you see things are working or not working, he said. They may love it. They may say, You know what? I love the fact that youre putting out 10 times more content or more personal content to me, even though I know you used synthetic content to augment it. Thank you. Thank you.

As for the future? Steelberg said that We want to work with all the major talent agencies. We think anybody who is in the business of making money around a scarce brand should be thinking about their voice strategy.

And dont expect it to remain purely about audio, either. Weve always been fascinated by the potential of using synthetic content to either extend, augment, or potentially completely replace some of the legacy forms of content production, he continued. Be that in an audio sense or, ultimately in the future, a video sense.

Thats right: Once it has cornered the market in the world of audio deepfakes, Veritone plans to go one step further and enter the world of fully realized virtual avatars that both sound and look indistinguishable from their source.

Suddenly those personalized ads from Minority Report sound a whole lot less like science fiction.

Read more:
This startup wants to deepfake clone your voice and sell it to the highest bidder - Digital Trends

Jordan Peterson addresses students at fhe Cambridge Union on November 02, 2018 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. (Photo by Chris Williamson / Getty Images)

Thank you for signing up forThe Nations weekly newsletter.

To prepare for writing about Jordan Peterson, I asked numerous people I know what they thought of him. They all gave the same answer: Who?

Friends, where have you been? Petersons 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, sold 5 million copies and has been slated for translation into 50 languages. His YouTube channel has 3.68 million subscribers.

According to the man himself, he is so famous that a waiter recognized him in a restaurant and thanked him for changing his life, which cannot be said, Im guessing, for any other clinical psychologist in the world, or possibly any other Canadian.

This is quite an achievement for one whose work is crammed with references to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, the Bible, ancient Mesopotamian deities, Jesus, and Jung, and which, under a lot of sexist, conservative, mythological/biblical/evolutionary/animal-behavior folderol, basically tells men to grow up and grow a pair. Work hard, be responsible, demand more of yourself, make your bed. Peterson dragged that simple message out for 370 pages of unbelievably clotted, dreary prose, proving once again that your creative-writing teachers were wrong: Nobody cares about the quality of the writing if the message is what the reader wants to hear. Apparently there are a lot of men (most of his fans are men) who want to be told exactly how to stop making such a mess of their lives (Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back) and also that human beings are a lot like lobsters, programmed for hierarchy and combat. You can buy Hail Lobster T-shirts, pillows, limited-edition neckties, and even smartphone covers on his website. Scientists have said hes got lobsters all wrong, but whatever. I will never feel guilty about eating a lobster roll again.

You might think 12 rules were enoughby Rule 12, Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street, Peterson seemed to be reaching a bit. He obviously didnt think so, because his new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, offers a dozen more and weighs in at 432 pages. Preorders made it reach Amazons Top 10.

Why would so many people want to be hectored by an unpleasant know-it-all whose most recent contribution as a public intellectual was advocating an all-meat diet? The rules are mostly familiar self-help platitudes, which Peterson drags out for dozens of pages each by bringing in everything from his patients and family to Isis, Osiris, and Tolstoy.

Rule 7: Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. Rule 10: Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship. Rule 12: Be grateful in spite of your suffering. There are plenty of cats out there for you to pet.Current Issue

Subscribe today and Save up to $129.

There have always been men who want to be told exactly what to do to get what they wantin this case, women. Men, you may have noticed, have had a harder time getting quality girlfriends now that women dont have to marry to survive. They have to make more of an effort to be boyfriend material, let alone husband material, and this is not easy for the ones who think a beautiful, complaisant helpmeet should be handed to them on a platter. At worst, these young men become incels, raging at both feminists and alpha men who corner all the pretty ladies. Peterson shares their pain. Hes said some unwise things about how enforced monogamy would solve the problem, by which he did not mean the government doling out wives, as is sometimes claimed, but restoring social pressures to marry. (Good luck with that.) But he is also their drill sergeant: Clean your room. Be good at your job. Life is tough, but remember Rule 11: Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.

Not surprisingly, Peterson takes a dim view of feminism. Basically, he believes all women want to have babiesthey just dont want to have them with a manbaby. This contradictionpatriarchy is good, but men are flubbing itleads him into all kinds of strange places. Famously, he contends that symbolically, men represent order, women chaos. Really? Shouldnt that be the other way around? Who, after all, is cleaning and tidying, cooking, reorganizing the fridge, remembering to pick up the dry cleaning and send out birthday cards and put the parent-teacher conference on the calendarusually while holding down a job as well? Compare the apartments of single men and women in their 20s: Which sex is sleeping on sheets that havent been changed in three months? Maybe men were orderly in the distant past, for example when they served in the Roman armyall that building of forts and organizing of equipment Julius Caesar wrote about, to say nothing of keeping ones armor and weaponry polished and ready for action. But today? Theres a reason why a young man who fails to launch is described as living in Moms basement. Good old Mom. She probably still does his laundry.

I have no doubt that some people have been goaded into self-improvement by Peterson. He is quite right that peoplewomen as well as menneed meaning and purpose in their lives, need to find things they care about and to try their hardest to be good at them. Caught between the belief that they deserve to move forward without having to compete with pesky women, and the fact that the milestones of adulthood, like marriage and parenthood, may be economically out of reach, men can find it hard to resist cheap cynicism. But like it or not, we are social beings, so Rule 1: Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. Fortunately for the sarcastic among us, carelessly leaves a lot of wiggle room.

When it comes to stern and sober life advice, the best book is still Marcus Aureliuss Meditations, which has been guiding people through the struggles of life for at least a thousand years and is, moreover, well-written and short. Its advice can be summarized as follows. Rule 1: Try as hard as you can to be a good, responsible, serious person. Rule 2: Be aware that much of life is out of your control. Rule 3: In any case, soon you will be dead.

Visit link:
Jordan Petersons New Rules Are Old News - The Nation

Jordan Peterson has alienated loads of his fans by announcing that he is getting the coronavirus vaccine.

Writing on Twitter, the controversial professor told his followers he didnt have enough antibodies to prevent reinfection, necessitating a good old dose of the vaccine. He said:

But people were unimpressed with his attempt to not get ill and, commenting on his post, many expressed their distress that their hero had fallen victim to logic groupthink:

That Petersons fans hold opinions such as those above is perhaps unsurprising. The psychologist has garnered controversy for comparing trans activists with Chairman Mao, arguing that men have protected women throughout history rather than oppressed them, and advocating enforced monogamy, among other lovely ideas.

While he has never expressed mistrust in vaccinations or claimed that coronavirus is not real, his politics are part of a right-wing political playbook that often involves anti-vax views.

And so, his fans wiped their tears using pages ripped from Petersons bible 12 Rules For Life:

Peterson has not responded to any of his critics, so whether the backlash has quelled his desire to not be infected with coronavirus remains to be seen, although somehow we doubt it.

We look forward to hearing Peterson announce the 13th rule for life though, get the coronavirus vaccine.

Read more:
Jordan Peterson said hes getting a Covid vaccine and anti-vax fans are furious - indy100

Toronto

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a plan to regulate speech on the internet by placing it under the control of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. His bill is so awful that Peter Menzies, a former vice chairman of the commission, said it doesnt just infringe on free expression, it constitutes a full-blown assault upon it and, through it, the foundations of democracy.

Mr. Trudeaus Liberals claim they merely want to level the playing field between traditional broadcasters and online players such as Netflix and Spotify. Yet on its face the bill goes much further.

To begin with, anyone who makes programs available over the internet would be treated as a broadcaster and under the thumb of the CRTC. While websites wouldnt need a formal license to operate in Canada, the commission would have open-ended power to impose conditions and require them to make expenditures to support the Canadian broadcasting system. Who has to do this and how much do they have to spend? Theyll tell us later.

The legislation also vaguely alludes to the need for the Canadian broadcasting system to serve the interests of Canadians of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds. Again, whod have to do this and what theyd have to do is anyones guess.

Continue reading here:
Justin Trudeaus Plan to Control the Internet - The Wall Street Journal

12 Rules For Life Series, Essay One

This article was previously published on Medium.

Ive been an avid reader and student of philosophy, psychology and other related topics since my early teens.

My uncle first influenced and introduced me to thinkers like Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Plato and Socrates, and as I grew older, I discovered many others.

Some helped me understand the world and human beings better (Robbins, Taleb, Bruce Lee, Watts, Clare Graves, Frankl, Sowell, Rand, Hoppe, Rothbard, etc.), while others helped reinforce the formers ideas by either consistently contradicting themselves, introducing ridiculous ideas of their own or just regurgitating things others have said but completely out of context, thus exhibiting no understanding at all. Some examples include the likes of Marx, Sam Harris, Derrida, Harari, Piketty, Kelton and Keynes.

Either way, they all helped me sharpen and hone my own viewpoints, so for that, Im thankful even for the dumb texts Ive read.

In the last five years, Ive come to really enjoy and align with the philosophies of a particular individual, whom by now youve surely guessed is Jordan Peterson.

While I believe the most profound modern philosopher is likely Murray Rothbard, I believe Peterson is the most articulate and, for me, (personally) one of the most authentic and courageous people alive today.

So today as an homage to Jordans work, and as an attempt to introduce him and his audience to Bitcoin, Ive decided to write a series of articles that examine Bitcoin through a Jordan B. Peterson lens.

Im going to use his most popular book, 12 Rules For Life as the framework. While Ill follow the structure of the book because each of the chapters is quite dense, I will look to glean a number of lessons along the way with my interpretation of the essence of each.

I hope you find value in this series of essays, and if youre a Bitcoiner who has friends that youve not yet been able to orange pill, but are aligned with Jordans ideas and philosophy, I hope this becomes a useful resource.

Jordans first rule in the book is stand up straight, with your shoulders back.

He explores how the individuals position in the social hierarchy impacts their hormonal (serotonin) and dopaminergic systems, and vice versa, hence making it a feedback loop.

More importantly, though, the essence of the lesson is how by owning oneself and taking responsibility (standing up straight), you can influence these systems to either cease a downward spiral or commence an upward journey in life.

The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.

It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike.

- Peterson, 12 Rules For Life

This chapter is extraordinarily dense, with so much to unpack and relate to Bitcoin. It was hard for me to choose a single angle, so Ive explored multiple sections and how they each relate; socially, evolutionarily, economically and psychologically.

Note: I will use the words territory and private property interchangeably.

We live in a world with finite territory, and much like any other species, including the now-famous lobsters, our ability to subsist relies on how well we select, protect and handle our territory (aka; private property in a more anthropomorphic sense).

Territory matters. A few truths we must come to terms with are:

Humanity has, over the millennia, developed methods of protecting territory because it is fundamental to our survival as a species. We are collaborative by nature, and the means through which we collaborate is the exchange of private property. This private property (or territory) starts with you and extends to anything you mix your time and energy with on a voluntary basis without having taken it by force from another, although the latter does (and has) happened throughout history, hence the critical need for defence.

Examples of mechanisms for defence include anything from:

Whats important to note here is that without a mechanism for the protection of private property, society collapses. We are all individuals, who are inherently diverse and value everything subjectively. We cannot all own a portion of each other, nor own a part of everything. Its a physical and social impossibility.

Territory is not a social construct. Its a biological imperative.

Its the mechanism thats evolved through which nature achieves balance and equilibrium. Its an emergent, bottom-up phenomenon, not a top-down decree like pseudo scientists would have you believe.

Petersons overview on territory is brilliant, but I would recommend the incredible work by Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative), or you can wait for a piece Ill be writing in the future entitled: Private Property As A Biological Imperative, in which Ill dig deeper into the above.

So if territory and private property are central to existence, then how do we value, order and select it, knowing that we are all subjective beings and that all property is scarce?

Pecking orders are natural phenomena, and found across all living systems. Hierarchies have to develop because life cannot exist without some form of selection, and this cannot exist without prioritization.

This is not to say that there is one right way. Life is not so simplistic. We exist in a complex world where hierarchies and methods for prioritization emerge across multiple dimensions (remember the subjective nature of humans and what they value).

In other words, hierarchies will always form, so the question is not whether they should exist or not (thats like arguing about the existence of gravity), but in what form are hierarchies most conducive to life?

As with most things, its a spectrum.

On one side, we have hierarchies by fiat. These are unnatural and abhorrent. They exist by decree and because there is little to no skin in the game for some, they form at the expense and the exclusion of many.

On the other hand, we have those which are natural and emergent. These are best classified as hierarchies of competence. They are ergodic and dynamic by nature because participants have skin in the game.

Then, of course, we have everything in between. Reality is such that things are messy, and the extremes are rare.

If modernity has shown us anything, its that institutions that may have initially arisen due to competence and a desire for order, but cemented themselves by fiat and thus have become monopolies, will not only begin to decay, but as described by the cobra effect, they will pose a greater danger to existence than the original chaos they set out to manage.

The most prone to such degeneration (enhanced and accelerated by the moral hazard of having no skin in the game) are state monopolies on money, violence, morality and ethics (i.e., law). Why?

Because they are the levers of society. Theyre the glue which binds us. And because of this, they seem to incentivize two key reactions:

This edifice becomes more dangerous and fragile the larger it grows, and like the proverbial beast that must continually be fed, it continues to consume all in its path until it starves and collapses.

All hierarchies are dynamic, and even natural hierarchies tend to adjust, evolve, deconstruct and re-emerge, but fiat hierarchies, in particular, are prone to catastrophic collapse because, through monopolization and the incessant need to control and manage, they deviate further from natural order and become increasingly fragile.

I wrote about fiat versus natural authority at greater length here:

Resistance Is NOT Futile (1/2)

Inequality is one of the most pushed subjects today and one which is deeply misunderstood.

Many who know my work will know my position on inequality. I believe there is nothing more natural than inequality, and in fact, it is the basis of all diversity, nuance and life itself.

Nature is perfect in its imperfection and the result is a naturally unequal distribution of everything from skills, to values, to likes, dislikes, shapes, sizes, interests, resources, effort and everything else one can perceive.

The only thing that should be equal in the world is equality in probability. This means the game were all playing remains dynamic, because we all have skin in the game.

This is by and large how hierarchies naturally emerge, grow, correct and persist, unless of course there is a mechanism via which those at the top can remove their skin from the game, and thus remove the natural equality in probability inherent to stable, emergent systems (after which they decay and collapse).

People are not really angry about inequality, but unfairness. When the opportunity to move up exists and the risk to fall remains, the game is fair and the results are dynamic. If not, the game is rigged.

Read more here:

Utopian Dystopias

And here.

The Pareto principle is a perfectly natural power law distribution most commonly known as the 80/20 rule and best documented by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.

You know this not only in your own life (i.e., a smaller number of the things you do produce most of the results), but can see it all around the world and can even deduce it using some simple logic.

You know full well that a few of the songs by a band are their best. That a few players in any sport are disproportionately more impactful than the rest. That a few actors produce most of the hits. That a few hard and smart employees at work produce most of the output.

At a macro level, this manifests itself as uneven Pareto-type wealth distribution.

Think of the following example:

Two people start out working. One does the average nine to five, while the other decides to work two jobs, and save every penny of the second.

As they progress, the saver builds up a small capital base which he decides to use as his investment capital. The other person just continues working the nine to five and hangs out with friends afterwards.

Fast forward a few years, and the saver managed to grow his total wealth through some intelligent investments. He now has a greater capital base from which to invest and further compound that wealth, i.e., earning 5% a few years ago on a $1,000 investment may have yielded $50, but now that same 5% yields $500 per month because hes got $10,000 invested (for example).

Their proportionate wealth will start to look very much like an 80/20 distribution.

Now heres the beautiful part.

The saver, turned investor, gets addicted to his strategy and gets super greedy in the process, so he decides to take some silly risks to yield 50% on investment. He puts up a large chunk of his capital for it and then loses it because he was wrong about his investment.

Hes now back to square one and needs to practically start all over again.

This is the dynamic nature of life and how excessive risk can (and does) lead to natural rebalancing in any system.

Now lets look at the situation in an alternate universe. Saver never gets greedy but gets extremely risk averse. Instead of investing any more of his capital, he just decides to put it all where its safe and he no longer cares about growth.

In this scenario, the original spender who has seen his friend get ahead decides that he wants to catch up. Well, he begins to work harder, save and put those savings toward investments or activities that can yield a higher return. Hes got less to lose, hes younger and, as such, is willing to take more risk.

Over time, he begins to catch up because the original saver is content where he is.

Once again, the system rebalances. All distribution is dynamic and can either compound or erode. It does not standstill. There is no such thing as a static system. Thats exactly why equality can never exist. Its a static, imaginary, utopian (dystopian) dead state.

Inequality, Prices law and the Pareto distribution are all perfectly normal.

Unfairness is the real problem. When the game is rigged, people get pissed off.

Unfortunately, via the monopolization of violence, ethics, morality and most importantly, the production of the most important human technology (money), the state has managed to rig the game.

On a short enough timescale (which is long by individual standards), they are no longer subject to the downside. Neither are any of the organizations, institutions and representatives that can get close to any of the key monopolies of the state.

The result is unnatural distributions, and instead of the system re-balancing via natural correction, we get these 99/1 or even 99.9/01 type distributions of wealth.

Why?

Because: heads they win, tails you lose.

Its like playing a game of monopoly with one person keeping their hand in the box of money, so they cant lose. Or better yet, playing a game of poker where the initial leader of the game knows the dealer, makes a deal, and as such, any time he loses on the river, he gets bailed out from the chips that are in every other players stack.

If thats how the game is played, the rest of the players will soon leave. And thats exactly whats happening now, with Bitcoin.

Poker is actually a great analogy because it incorporates not only skill but luck. Prudent early play can get you ahead. You have to take risks sometimes, you have to bluff, sometimes youll have to fold. If you play well, you can amass enough chips to begin to play harder and more rough, but, the chance to lose it all always exists, and thus, keeps the game fair.

Modernity is a rigged poker game and Bitcoin fixes it by tearing money out of the hands of any one player and thus reintroducing skin in the game for all.

Changing tack a little here is the evolutionary idea of fitness and selection.

As Jordan writes:

The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness.

It is fitness that is selected.

The fit in fitness is the matching of organismal attributes to environmental demand.

Fitness is that which is ever more accurately approximated across time, and its important to note that its neither a linear process nor one that is always trending toward more fitness.

Its like a dance. There is a direction across time, but much like two dancers, it moves, sways and swings as it hones and adapts toward ever more fitness.

Bitcoins proof-of-work network is much the same. The difficulty adjustment, incentive mechanism and the work required to participate make Bitcoin an organism that one can argue are alive.

Brilliant minds like Gigis have done this topic far more justice than I can here, so I suggest a review of the following:

Proof Of Life

Furthermore, there is the natural selection process we as individuals make in our pursuit of economic survival. Ive called it Economic Darwinism and its related to Greshams law (i.e., good money pushes out bad money).

We select the money that best performs the three key functions of money:

Making the wrong selection relegates us to poverty and diminishes our capacity to cooperate, collaborate and interact with the rest of society.

As such, we are incentivized to converge and select the fittest mechanism via which the product of our labor can be stored, exchanged and measured.

This fittest medium is unequivocally Bitcoin, and the self-reinforcing, convergent nature of the network effect of money will only continue to accelerate this realization as it spreads globally.

This then brings me to the idea of:

Status is the metaphysical relationship between us and the rest of the world.

Its our relationship to not only the dynamic distribution of all the resources, wealth, skills, shapes, sizes, etc., in the world, but our position in the multitude of hierarchies across every dimension and category one comes into contact with.

This is where the rubber meets the road and why our systems are hormonally, neurologically and biologically wired the way they are.

Read more here:
Bitcoin, Hierarchy And Territory - Bitcoin Magazine