Jubilee/for Protocol Symposium
17 Jun 2026 - 06 Sep 2026
Tasks
- Read that book (or get Claude to summarize)
- Collect various works (there are multiple outlines and such)
- Slides in DOwnloads/jubilee-meta-protocol Claude
- Final Subtopic outline for talk
- Agent based model
- Polish stance (this should be part of outline, like first part)
- Tell a story. How I got into this. How it connects to other bad ideas (anarchism). Graeber vs capitalists.
- Is there a general theory of something like forgiveness or protocol loosening?
- Protocol: money, trade, taxation
- System-level bugs (accumulation, immiseration, power imbalances)
- Attempts to restore equilibrium
- Jubilee implies a personal ruler (or equivalent), someone who can set the rules aside. If the rules wer eimplemented by rigid machinery (crypto eg) it wouldn't work
- Except wasn't there a kind of Ethereum reset event?
- the rational aspect vs the festive aspect.
- Parties aren't rational. Why do you think they called it jubilee?
- See Bakhtin discussion at Claude
- Money as the ur-protocol. Trade, accumulation, debt. The counterpart of labor.
- My weird personal stance (not sure that is interesting, but might be useful framing).
- Which is? I suck at economics, but that is like saying you are stupid (to these people).
- It's like saying you are better than money.
- A component of leftism I am trying to shed.
- Trying to adjust to Brand-Ribbonfarm realism/libertarianism
- I apologize. I'm labor all the way. My perverted attempt to submit to the power of economics, while pretending not to... again, why is my personal kink interesting?
- Argh.
- I've made a career of mocking libertarians, but I realize that I shouldn't. They worship markets and think they can and should subsume all other forms of social relationship – which is wrong. Markets have their place, that should be obvious to all but the dumbest kind of Marxist...and it should be a big place, since it
- What am I trying to say? Jubilee is obviously a stupid and unworkable idea. Obviously if you introduce a market distortion like that, people will adapt their behavior so it won't have the intended effect.
- Perhaps it is the ultimate or original leftist economic idea.
- Certainly popular
- The bugs of money
- Concentrations of wealth, inequality, debt'
- Hyperinflation When Money Dies
- Violent Revolution as the only possible response
- Anthropology of money
- Biblical treatment (aside from jubilee)
- What is Jubilee?
- Was it actually practiced?
- Is this a valid instance of a category in protocol theory?
- A patch, a meta-protocol?
- Analogs: bankruptcy (previously debtor's prisons?)
- Bahktinian carnival? (from The Cheese and the Worms ). Not sure at all,
- Or is it the idea of forgiving, that somehow you can loosen the rigid rules of a protocol, can build that in.
- Every government aid program is a patch (usually a bad one) for the failures of the basic money protocol.
- Known bugs and fixes and patches
- Agent-based simulation! Just do it.
- First model accumulation of wealth, concentration. Parameterize
- Then model various Jubilee patches
- The Carnivalesque as the suspension of rules Bahktin
- Ask Claudethis was for the whole page (as of Jul 9th, 2026 )
Money as Ur-Protocol: Structured Notes
Core Framing
- Money as the foundational human protocol - predates most others, enables all others. Not just a tool but a rule-system that structures social reality.
- Your stance: labor-identified, which gives you a particular angle of vision on money as the other thing - the counterpart that captures, abstracts, and transforms labor into something alien to it.
The Protocol Structure of Money
- What money actually does as a protocol:
- Establishes commensurability (everything can be compared)
- Enables deferred exchange (debt = time enters the protocol)
- Enables accumulation (the bug that becomes a feature, or vice versa)
- Abstracts labor into tradeable units
- The core bugs aren't accidents - they're structural:
- Accumulation is intrinsic, not aberrant
- Debt is intrinsic - money and debt may be the same thing (Graeber's argument)
- Concentration follows mathematically from the rules
The Bugs
Concentration/Inequality
- Not a failure of the protocol but an emergent property
- Mathematic inevitability under certain conditions (Piketty: r > g)
- Agent-based simulation would show this clearly - just do it
Debt
- Graeber: debt is prior to money, not derivative
- Debt as the original social obligation formalized
- Debtor's prison → bankruptcy as patch evolution
Hyperinflation
- The protocol eating itself
- When Money Dies as case study
- Weimar: social dissolution follows monetary dissolution
Violent Revolution
- When patches fail, when bugs become unbearable
- Not external to the protocol - produced by it
- The system's failure mode when Jubilee doesn't happen
Jubilee as Protocol Patch
What is Jubilee?
- Biblical (Leviticus 25): every 50 years, debts cancelled, slaves freed, land returned
- Radical reset of accumulated asymmetries
- Operates within the protocol to correct the protocol's own bugs
Was it practiced?
- Scholarly consensus: probably not, or rarely
- More aspirational/ideological than operational
- But: similar debt-cancellation edicts were practiced in Mesopotamia (Babylonian andurārum)
- So the category is real even if the specific instance is disputed
As Protocol Theory Category
- Yes, this is valid - it's:
- A meta-protocol: rules about when to suspend the rules
- A scheduled patch: built-in correction mechanism
- Addresses the accumulation bug directly by periodically zeroing it
- The key insight: Jubilee tries to make the patch part of the protocol rather than external to it. That's what makes it theoretically interesting.
The Patch Taxonomy
Patch What it fixes How well Jubilee Debt + land concentration Aspirational; rarely implemented Bankruptcy Unpayable debt Partial; preserves creditor priority Progressive taxation Wealth concentration Partial; easily gamed Government aid programs Poverty/exclusion Usually symptomatic, not structural Violent revolution Everything Destructive reset; high cost Carnival/Jubilee-spirit Symbolic inversion Psychological; non-structural
The Carnivalesque Connection (Bakhtin)
- Bakhtin's carnival: temporary, licensed suspension of hierarchy. The low becomes high, rules are mocked, the body triumphs over the official.
- Is this analogous to Jubilee?
- Partially - both involve:
- Scheduled suspension of normal rules
- Release of accumulated social pressure
- Official sanction of what is normally forbidden
- But the difference matters:
- Carnival is symbolic - hierarchy resumes, nothing structurally changes
- Jubilee is material - debts actually cancelled (in theory)
- Carnival may protect the protocol by venting pressure
- Jubilee would actually alter the protocol's outputs
- Carnival as the patch that patches nothing - the safety valve that keeps the system running by simulating its suspension.
- From The Cheese and the Worms: Menocchio's cosmology as carnival thinking applied to theology - unauthorized inversion of official categories. But Ginzburg shows it gets you burned. The carnivalesque has limits; power reasserts.
The Forgiving Structure
- Your intuition about forgiving as a category:
"you can loosen the rigid rules of a protocol, can build that in"
- This is genuinely interesting as protocol theory:
- Most protocols are rigid by design (that's what makes them protocols)
- The question is whether you can have principled flexibility - forgiveness as rule
- Jubilee attempts this
- Bankruptcy attempts this
- The tension: forgiveness built into a protocol changes agent behavior in advance (moral hazard in economic terms; grace in theological terms)
- The theological resonance isn't accidental - forgiveness of debt and forgiveness of sin run together in the Lord's Prayer (aphes hēmin ta opheilēmata hēmōn). Same word.
The Simulation Project
- Agent-based model, two phases:
Phase 1: Demonstrate the Bug
- Agents with initial wealth distributions (uniform or normal)
- Simple exchange rules
- Watch concentration emerge
- Parameterize: how fast? under what conditions?
- Should reproduce Pareto distribution without trying
Phase 2: Model the Patches
- Implement Jubilee at intervals (every N steps)
- Parameterize Jubilee completeness (full reset vs. partial)
- Implement progressive taxation variant
- Implement bankruptcy variant
- Measure: Gini coefficient over time, velocity of reconcentration after patch, stability
- Key question the simulation could answer: Does Jubilee solve the concentration bug or just delay it? Does the reconcentration rate after Jubilee tell us something about the structural depth of the bug?
Anthropology of Money
- Graeber (Debt: The First 5000 Years):
- Debt is prior to money, prior to barter (barter myth debunked)
- Money emerges from debt obligations, not from trade convenience
- This inverts the standard economics story
- Implication: money is debt, debt is money - not separable
- Biblical treatment beyond Jubilee:
- Prohibition on interest (neshek) to fellow Israelites
- Allowed to foreigners - the protocol has in-group/out-group structure
- This is interesting: the protocol modifies itself based on social relationship
- Usury debates through medieval Christianity
Open Questions
- Is money the ur-protocol or is language? Or are they co-originary?
- Can the accumulation bug be fixed within the protocol or does fixing it require a different protocol?
- What's the relationship between the protocol's bugs and the political will to patch them? (Jubilee never implemented = patches require power that the bug-beneficiaries have)
- Does the simulation tell us something we don't already know, or does it demonstrate what we know in a new form? (Both valuable, but different)
- Meta stuff
- Listening to rafa/sachin on ai cap model, realize I need to pitch slower, less pretending-to-be-a-fucking-genius.
- forgiveness/as protocol