21. Genealogy as Blockchain

Why are so many rocks in the Arabian desert covered in ancient graffiti? And why is so much of this graffiti lists of ancestors? We coincidentally both read the same paper by Michael C.A. MacDonald, a complete legend, and it sparked an interesting chain of thought.

An oral society is not less sophisticated than a literate one. You lose a lot of value when you switch to literacy. In particular, you lose flexibility - in oral societies, poems for example change constantly with each retelling. New bits are added, the fat is cut, the themes are updated for the audience being addressed. The Iliad shows the power of what this process can achieve.

As a desert nomad, hospitality and cooperation between strangers is crucial. In a series of one shot prisoners’ dilemmas in a hostile and remote environment, how do you make this happen? You need to link your identity to a wider body, a clan. When you establish this link, your clan becomes accountable for your actions, and you for theirs. Furthermore, individuals far from home can establish how their two clans relate to each other by looking back up the chain and using this to establish a basis for cooperation.

Then you add the flexibility of an oral society, which enables cooperative fabrication - aha, that Diogenes in my family tree must be the same Diogenes that’s in yours. A link is established, the record updated. We can see genealogies shifting over time as the relationships between clans shifted, the record updated as a result of thousands of interactions and negotiations.

We propose that this is a proto distributed ledger, an ancestor of today’s blockchains. There is not a single source of truth, but instead thousands of nodes all holding part of the overall database. The power is in the overall consensus, the agreement between all the players in the system. In fact if you can get enough nodes to agree to change the record, they will outvote everyone else and the change will become the truth.

While a centralised database has enormous benefits to productivity, we lose flexibility, the ability to change and forget and collaboratively create an updated reality. This ability to be inconsistent, to develop and change, is part of our human advantage, and a permanent central record of everything we’ve done means we’ve lost something.