The tokenization of the world and the Book of Life

BlackRock wants to tokenize the world. Will the blockchain become a "Book of Life"?

BlackRock, one of the largest investment management companies in the world (approximately $39 trillion), aims to tokenize the world. This means converting ownership titles of various assets, such as bonds and stocks, as well as real estate and much more, into digital tokens on a blockchain.

In terms closer to the crypto culture, BlackRock wants to transform everything of economic value into NFTs.

Tokenization is an extremely profitable business that promises to innovate the entire investment sector by leveraging the capabilities of transparency and notarization of the blockchain. In the not-too-distant future, everything we can see and touch, as well as everything that exists in the digital realm, could have a cryptographic label telling its story on an endless, immaterial universal ledger.

Setting aside, albeit relevant, the theme of these financial giants wanting to own and manage both the tangible and intangible world on behalf of others, there are some reflections to be made on the topic.

I believe that this desire for hyper-tokenization is a digital manifestation of the hyper-rationalization of our society, which has been unrelentingly progressing for several centuries. I do not think this is a good thing, and I will try to explain why.

By rationalization, I mean the activity aimed at making society more suitable and responsive to functional needs and purposes. The journey to make Western society more responsive to functional needs began around the time of the French Revolution, as a distortion of the humanistic principles that placed Man and his intellectual capabilities (including Science) at the center of the Universe.

John Dewey, one of the early leaders of the "progressive" movements, stated almost two centuries ago: "Science and democracy together have the power to reconstruct religious truth, and with this new truth, religion can unify humanity."

Dewey, like all early progressives, believed that the State was a divine instrument that should be used to shape society and create a perfect world.

The "new religion" Dewey spoke of, born from the unification of science and mass democracy, led to the first experiences of the Welfare State and the rationalization of human society in 1929, with the creation of the Social Security Number (similar to our Tax ID) and the subsequent cataloging, on analog archives, of every single human being.

Today, the process of rationalization is finally set to engulf everything through the recording of people, things, art, and even economic transactions, relationships, and thoughts on immutable digital archives. Our very identity, that is, the set of attributes that represent us, can be tokenized. Projects implementing the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI) using the European blockchain services infrastructure (EBSI) are already underway.

Blockchain as the Book of Life

If John Dewey were still alive, he would probably today speak of blockchain and algorithms as bases for reconstructing a new religious truth, rather than science and democracy.

To better explain this concept, I asked for help from Brenda, author of Anthropocentric Cosmology:

The idea that each of our thoughts and actions could be recorded and judged is very similar to the concept of the Book of Life, of a God who marks every move we make and judges us. And while some might desire to have such power and control others, we are essentially creating (perhaps without realizing it?) tools that could allow this through tokenization.

We live in an age where many reject religion but, paradoxically, there is a tendency to try to create new forms of control or power that resemble those of a God, but according to their own human desires and plans.

In Theosophy, these are referred to as "akashic records." These records of Akasha were/are their concept of a universal archive that encompasses all aspects of reality, from the past, present, and future. These archives contain every event in the universe, from every past moment to all that is to come. Theosophists aspired to access these records in an attempt to acquire certain knowledge.

The blockchain, she continues, thus becomes a representation of a sort of “Book of Life (Sefer HaChaim) in which every transaction, action, thought, and human triviality is scrupulously noted, inflicting inexorable judgments based on such registrations”.

With this digital Book of Life, it will finally be possible to realize the progressive dream: to unify (centralize and control) and rationalize all of humanity to achieve the perfect society.

Distributed computing systems indeed have interesting affinities with some esoteric concepts. Perhaps paradigmatic is the existence of "Oracles," that is, computer systems designed to connect blockchains with the external world and thus enable the activation of smart contracts upon the realization of certain real conditions.

Especially interesting is also a visual comparison between the diagram of a patent for a distributed computing system dating back to 1991 and an esoteric image from 1838, which represents the "descent of the spirit into matter."

The creation of these new Books of Life on blockchain will also accompany the digital transformation of the State, which is primarily an ontological transformation.

First of all: the modern State of mass democracies, which also arose from the ashes of the French Revolution, is amoral. The modern democratic state does not care about the welfare of its citizens, but only about surviving at all costs, like a parasitic organism.

Through digital transformation, this parasitic organism will become an immovable engine and source of distributed systems and digital Oracles that will record every human event in immutable digital registers. The data will then be conferred to hyper-rational and aseptic algorithms oriented exclusively to making society more "functional."

The State and its bureaucrats/priests will in turn be shaped by algorithms that will self-feed from their own feedback loops. In this context, citizens, outside the halls of power, will play their role as cogs and informational inputs at the base of a distributed system interconnected to an inscrutable technocratic God, who sees and judges everything.

The interconnection between systems is essential for this to occur; in China, they have already understood this for some time. The new paradigm is the total transparency of the citizen, whose life will be recorded in the great digital Books of Life, and the complete opacity of state’s systems.

The model citizen is a barcode with legs, whose life will be freely searchable and accessible by more or less anyone. Google has already begun indexing on its search engine the blockchain transactions made with Bitcoin. In a few decades, it will probably be possible to reconstruct the entire financial history, relationships, and life of anyone with a single click.

Is there a way to stop this drift? In the short term, I don't think so; history must take its course, and the mild tyranny of mass democracies does not allow for detachment from this phase of (inhumane) hyper-rationalization of our society. However, as those who operate in the markets also know, I believe it is more important to recognize the direction of the world and adapt accordingly, rather than futilely attempting to fight the trend.