The notion of boxing –particularly failed boxing– is much more ubiquitous than people seem to give it credit for. It appears to me to be a common shape in systems which attempt to implement some sort of shape-agnostic competence-search at all. Intentionally or not. It is a relation between two games, where one of them only exists in order to produce desirable results for the players of the other one.
For any game (fray), there is a meta-game (throne) which allows for this game to be played. One of the moves within this meta-game was the decision that the rules of this fray matter, that its outcomes are allowed to have some sort of effect in the greater world. The next move of the throne can be to change this ruling. The meta game can also play the move of merely pretending that the fray matters, without ever actually heeding its rules. I can make a 100$ bet about a coin toss with you. You believe that this game really is law. If the coin comes up heads and I win then I will happily take my 100$, you will unhappily chalk it up to luck, believing that you are net neutral across branch-space and the illusion of the game mattering will be maintained. If it comes up tails however, I will not give you your money. I will point a gun at your head and take 100 bucks by force. There never was a gamble, only the illusion of one. The game we were really playing was a robbery with the pleasant (for me) side-effect that you will only go to the authorities half of the time.
With the Nixon Shock, Europe and Japan were rather abruptly confronted with the fact that “keep exchange rates stable to avoid crashes and have all economies indirectly, through foreign held dollars, backed by gold” was not in fact the game they were playing. The framework of Bretton Woods had made it look this way, but only because they had spent some time in a world in which this game looked remarkably similar to the real game of “make the dollar powerful”.
The distinction is not nearly so clear cut though. In most cases the throne does not pick in advance whether it is faking or really playing by a certain set of rules. It will merely propose and permit actions which are beneficial in the moment without making any decision or commitment on whether the rules of all those little games beneath them are real. All parameters are free until they become relevant. So long as no conflict arises from them, any effort thinking or ruling about this is meaningless. They are systems which have not been destroyed so far –which maybe have been on the winning side of conflicts with other systems– so make of that what you will. Only when two games come into conflict, or when one game starts to produce outcomes which the throne dis-endorses, is a ruling made. One game is shown to be a sham, its rules an illusion and its players suckers, while another will be, for a brief moment, protected with violence from up high, signifying that they are more real –more circumstantially convenient– than the other guy.
This scheme usually goes a few layers up. The rules of the fray exist at the behest of throne A, which in turn exists, and has the right to make such calls at the pleasure of throne B, which etc etc. Any throne is part of another’s fray until someone appeals to the rules of physics and is stumped when an outside adversary initiates false vacuum collapse and those go flying out the window (in so far as flying or windows are still meaningful ideas). The stack is almost surely finite, but it is rather tall. Moreover, it is not static.
Let us for a moment assume that handing resource allocation directly to Moloch is a good idea, which –let’s not kid ourselves– is nigh definitionally what dumping our universal equivalent into anything which successfully self-replicates in order to reward “growth” does. If fostering anything that can gain traction on the mesa level –anything that can brainhack humans into serving as its sex-organs– was a sane strategy, we would still run into problems, because this “friendly” demon of schizophrenic replicator selection breeds mesa optimizes which want to eat it. If the market were boxed, this would not be a concern, but nothing in the game hierarchy is boxed. Upper management only has opinions about what’s being played on the lower levels because it affects their own standing.
Let us assume for the moment that some throne has found it convenient to allow for a perfectly free market to allocate resources, and some universal equivalent connecting those resources, throughout its domain. It could intervene at any time –could stop to back the equivalent with violence at any time– but it does not. Right now, this game is useful. The issue is that this game has an effect on the world within which the throne-game is being played, and moreover: the players of the free-market fray have interests outside of this fray. They do not intrinsically want to win at the market, they want to have nice things and the power to keep them, which is easier to guarantee the higher up the “do we actually care about those rules”-tree you find yourself. Therefore, if you find yourself winning quite considerably at the market game, you acquire resources which are useful in the throne-game. You have no guarantee that the market game will continue to work out well for you, and depending on which sociopolitical situation exists around you, you may not even be too certain that the market game will continue to be real in the way it is right now. If you want reliable access to nice things, you put your profits not into the market game, but into the meta-game –into the throne-structures which allowed for the market to exist– and you try to give yourself advantages such that you keep your lead.
A thing, incubated and empowered in the mesa game has grabbed hold of the meta game and abolished the context it sprung from, such that this selection system could not breed another of its ilk to make trouble.
Yanis Varoufakis believes that this has already happened on a much larger scale than a few corporations cutting out monopolies from the common fray so as to be shielded from hungry upstarts. He believes that the digital infrastructure, which is as concentrated to a few large hands as land once was, has in the same manner created a feudalism which strangled the market from which it sprung. There are still markets, but they are amazon’s market for instance. The arbitrage has been subsumed into the exclusive domain of what used to be a single actor in the mesa game. A single actor which now profits from every transaction and would be fiercely difficult to deselect. The tech giants have recognized a throne and usurped it. Locking in their skilfully earned advantage so as to not be forced to rely on skill in the future.
By virtue of intelligence-escape, we can imagine that any suboptimal paradigm attempting to ossify could still be arbitraged into oblivion by even a microscopic seed of canny inefficiency-exploitation within a reasonable program-search. So long as the market acts at the highest level, this is true. But it doesn’t. However much one attempts to render politics vestigial in this game, coordination does occur. Violence does occur. The slot from which the market can be circumscribed does always exist. The throne is not empty and cannot be made empty from the inside because the very rule which would state that fact is not ontologically binding. It cannot be made ontologically binding from anywhere but a throne. For any market there is a meta selector over systems to implement, and it is not forced to select “a reasonable competence-search” unanimously. Therefore the mesa optimizer (any firm, individual or diffuse constellation of these), can grab the throne, tame the market from one layer up and wield stringent violence to ensure its place. When an economy collapses, its normal systems and rules are still intrinsically running. It knows who the bag-holder are etc. It contains no rules which care about whether it has collapsed or not. By having collapsed however, these internal rules not longer matter. There was a throne to which these rules were useful and now they no longer are. Often, when governments print new currencies, they do not distribute them in accordance with the market-derived relative wealth. They do not simply curb a few zeroes or tether the bills to something new. If the market derived allocation is not useful, then it ceases to ever have had any validity. The next round will be played from a different starting point all together. The rules were a convenient justification of the prevailing power-structure but not its generator. If they fail to justify then the throne picks a new system which does. Up until that too fails somehow.
Boxing problems are omnipresent. The process of searching for something which “wins” within a very general context, is one which finds systems that competently use leverage. The greatest deal of leverage definitionally does not exist in the fray. It does not matter how safe your selector is against internal ossification of malignant structures, so long as something can reach up to the spot from which it was created and simply rob that safe, elegant search of its ability to make decisions which matter.