A society embracing deep freedom seeks to encourage the individual to fully express themselves in the direction of their choosing. By embracing core values in alignment with the single truth, we develop highly capable individuals who share reverence and responsibility toward others within the relational universe. Our vision of deep freedom will create alternative visions of the world through its very design, some of which may seek to deny the single truth and the path toward alignment explored herein. The most common form of denial will be the rejection of the core values of relation and equity, that all possess a birthright to dignity through our collective social inheritance. In a world of decentralized microcommunities, stakeholder-driven public works, and individuals free to move and group as they please, the need for accurate information regarding the other is a necessity. So how do we develop reliable systems of reputation while simultaneously protecting the individual from a corruptible centralized body? The answer is tokenized reputation.
Imagine never having to write a résumé and cover letter ever again; imagine the relief of avoiding redundancies like reentering information contained on your resume into a poorly designed web form. We are talking about a more accurate method of measuring individual capacity in relation to specific tasks that would eliminate the need for physical résumés and the obscure algorithms that sort through them. Of course, this scenario would also eliminate opportunities for embellishment, but no one ever believed that you increased sales by 69,420 percent anyway.
Tokenized reputation is the process of embedding skills into digital tokens that the individual can gain and “level up” throughout their lives. They can take nearly any form and support everything from the casual hobbyist to the world-class expert and everything in between. Reputation tokens can be both standardized and customizable. Each token contains a variety of information and is nontransferable, available only to the individual who has earned them. The development of tokenized experience measurement also supports individuals choosing to navigate the future under an anonymous pseudonym. Industry- and talent-specific DAOs can support this effort by collaborating to establish objectives that can be reinforced through no-cost testing, demonstrated milestones, and certification. Successful completion of the milestones automatically generates mintable tokens for the individual. Where many tokens are written so that they cannot be altered, experience and reputation tokens may benefit from a more flexible foundation that will allow for alteration of the original as the standard requirements to support greater depths of expertise. As the process becomes more established, we can imagine DAOs automating access requirements to certain task bounties, ensuring that those dedicating the energy and focus necessary to achieve mastery within specific verticals have priority access to complex and challenging tasks. Given that experience and expertise are ultimately subjective, tokenized reputation raises the bar on the reliable communication of competence and skill but does not necessarily replace the traditional interview process that some may value. However, it does reduce some of the wasteful practices of modern occupation searching and hiring while also increasing the verifiability of an individual’s skill set. Thinking expansively, tokenized reputation could be gamified to encourage the continual process of education. For example, someone achieving mastery across four separate verticals might be granted a “generalist” token, while someone dedicating ten or more years to a single vertical of expertise might be granted a ranking token to further legitimize and communicate their experience.
Tokenized reputation can also be used for legal purposes such as tracking criminal activity. We can imagine a scenario where, despite having access to the eight dignities, an individual desires some sort of luxury item and decides to steal it instead of investing the time and energy to create or acquire one. If found guilty in a public trial, punitive sentences such as probation can be assigned to individuals via tokens that highlight these blemishes. These same tokens can carry automatic expirations where they would self-expunge from the individual’s record after a set period of time without infractions. It is a more effective and reliable method of empowering individuals to grow beyond their faults than the present bureaucratic justice system. It also serves to further legal equity. For example, many states are legalizing cannabis while doing nothing to address those imprisoned for its possession. Within a tokenized reputation system, passing a new law legalizing something once illegal could automatically eliminate the sentences of offenders within the penal system. Tokenized reputation helps manage and distribute information about individuals through a process that is more cost-effective, transparent, and less subject to corruption than our present methods.
Our intent with tokenized reputation is not to create an Orwellian social credit score. We can imagine scenarios where we empower large groups of people to issue positive reputation tokens to individuals but preemptively reject the idea of issuing negative tokens outside of a specific niche. For example, we do not want individuals to carry the burden of failed professional experiments. We also want to avoid arbitrary negativity, such as the limitation or intimidation of countercultural ideas—often referred to as “canceling.” Every individual has the right to express their creativity in the direction they see fit, so long as they are not causing direct harm or subjugating others. Direct is the key word. Spreading ignorance—while both frustrating and diminishing the individual doing so—is not a crime, nor should it be. If anything, the wild conspiracy theories that our population grapples with today highlight a broader failure of systems of meaning and value within the human time experience, resulting from the present arrangement of society. In many ways, tokenized reputation is an inevitability. In our immediate present, we have an opportunity to proactively shape the design of such a system. We can prioritize the development of tokenized reputation within the vision of deep freedom we demand for ourselves and others.
