We need network societies, not network states (2024)
cip.org
cip.org
The idea that multiple people with no shared background will magically come together and collaborate to the extent that they can form an scalable movement that results in a meatspace state that is one cohesive collaborative unit.
Whenever a group of people pool their effort and resources together, another group of opportunistic people will try to take advantage.
The Network State is inspired by cryptocurrencies, which are often affected by predatory speculative behavior. Pyramid schemes, pump and dump schemes, rug pulls, etc.
The more resources and effort are pooled together, and the more power is accrued, the higher the incentive for competitors to arise, both internal and external.
And this flaw is the aspect shared with most utopian theories that expect everyone to collaborate do not account for simple game theory. Give enough incentives and the doves turn into hawks.
Another flaw is that by having a highly sparse geographical distribution, the political representation of their members and the likelihood they will gain enough influence to take over tends to zero unless each member can attain local leadership and influence.
At most, that can get that to scale to city-states, but city-states are almost always vassal states.
I love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more
2009.
Why do I think that Spiderman has just schooled me on my age.
There's a lot to be said for pseudonyminity.
That's just not the world most people want to live in...
Multi signature wallets exist.
Well... with a traditional bank, everyone knows that in a pinch you can just show up at any branch of your bank, present a government issued ID card and get your money. That doesn't need an user manual or any technical knowledge.
Setting up multi-sig wallets and actually working disaster protection however? That needs a looot of knowledge.
I made this exact argument in discussions with "blockchain" proponents, in discussions of why "code as law" was not good, and got near-universal, vehement disagreement. I suspect that you underestimate how many people argue it.
Hey stupid, who is going to work in your factories?
And follow the premise from there.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1549867.Planet_of_No_Ret...
I wish this were a laughing matter, but it's not. These people appear to be quite serious and quite capable. There's a coalition in play that includes the Project 2025 authors among others, operating at a scope that a lot of people don't fully appreciate. If this coalition holds together, they may be able to execute what many would consider a rather frightening agenda.
Despite its cheesy title, this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no ) offers an interesting perspective on Balaji Srinivasan and his place in a larger web of influence alongside people like Yarvin, Musk, and Vance. It's eye-opening. She released it back in November and promptly took a lot of flack from people calling her alarmist and conspiracy-prone, and now it's basically playing out in real time.
The Corpos seizing power from a failing democracy, instigating war, and then declaring their own territories and power structures. From which the country, the world, never recovers.
In this world free of geography, who exactly is responsible for keep all of the geographically constrained plumbing in operation while you recline at your desk and enjoy the digital porcelain? And would a board of corporate overlords owning your patch of land really serve you better than a council of local representatives?
Your internet pipes are starting right behind the modem. So is your electricity. The energy mix powering your life depends on the geopolitics of your area, as it might be nuclear/solar/hydro/gas/fuel powered and therefore dependent on your country's stance towards nuclear power plants, renewables, your country's geography, and natural resources. Your power bill at the end of the month also largely depends on that stuff, amongst most other things. Consequently so does your net income and ability to enjoy all that tech.
The content served to you is generally on CDNs nearest to you. A vast majority of the content you produce and consume is extremely related to relatively localized influences, such as your English keyboard, the average search engine results that are biased towards your location, any of the myriad of system settings that accommodate for your local culture, etc. Side-note: as a French (France) citizen in Quebec (Canada) it's been absolute hell trying to actually access the internet I knew back home, because search engines flat out don't show me what I used to get in fr_fr since fr_ca dominates here. (Kagi offsets that a bit thanks to locale being selectable, although there's a dearth of results at times somehow, perhaps driven by differences between what's preferred on the pipes in North America vs Europe).
When and how you access these technologies depends nearly entirely on your local area, as you're generally unlikely to be jogging at 2:30am your time, unlikely to play your games mid-day on a weekday as defined by your country and culture, etc.
And when a storm hits your area, the whole world won't care but your neighbor will have to protect himself and his belongings just as much as you will.
While we are indeed more connected than ever before, the primary things we've connected are our anxieties and rich people's consolidated power. The rest remains profoundly local.
Defense from strongman-style authoritarians and bandits
> How long until we free ourselves entirely from this constraint?
When we overcome the gravity well with several orders of magnitude less energy than required. Then the constraint is still geography, but allows people to spread out.
We do desperately need a big rethink of our incentives, by all means invite the game theorists--lets get nerdy about it--but if we then enshrine the results of that analysis into a protocol that makes it so (thus creating a network state) it's doomed to fail due to a lack of legitimacy. Whatever we build has to let people disagree, but amplify the cases where they agree so that we can find what's actionable, not what's engaging. Web 2 and 3 have failed so far to get that right. C'mon 4 we're rooting for you.
That's always been the core issue.
But lets not, because partition tolerance, not consistency, has the superior political implications. Blockchains are just on the wrong side of the CAP theorem. It's a place for authoritarians and willful ignorance of important truths.
The same organization could've convened virtually, or by mail, or simply at another location if it became necessary.
There is no requirement that Jan 6 even reach a conclusion that day - the issue was that it was unprecedented that people believed they would change the result by violence.
And yes anyone could connect, that would be the whole point--to make it totally unambiguous to any interested party whether or not a given state change re: the machinery of government had occurred. Laws going on and off the books, being renewed or expiring on their own, gps coordinates of national and state borders and updates thereto, that sort of thing.
As it is, a sufficiently coordinated cabal of media people could just lie to the rest of us about the election result and we would have no source of truth to compare their lies to. Cutting out those intermediaries (or at least providing something definitive to check them against) would be a good thing.
> The same organization could've convened virtually, or by mail, or simply at another location if it became necessary.
And in that case, where presumably our leadership is so under threat that they can't safely assemble and have a press conference or whatever, how does the message get out to the rest of us, and how do we authenticate it when it does?
I realize that the threat on Jan 6 was not so great, but suppose it was much greater, a permissioned block chain which both leadership and citizens knew how to use would be a helpful thing. Most other technology that you might reach for can only be as trustworthy as its least trustworthy admin, and as we're seeing right now, that admin might be quite untrustworthy indeed.
Permission by who? Under what authority? Who is hosting the servers this thing sits on? Who has voting rights on it?
As soon as your proposing a scenario like:
> a sufficiently coordinated cabal of media people could just lie to the rest of us about the election result
then why would they not also be able to partition the network links to ensure updates don't propagate? And do you even still have a government if it can't exercise any significant control over it's territory (short answer: no).
> then why would they not also be able to partition the network links to ensure updates don't propagate?
Perhaps they can. Maybe you have to sneak a thumb drive with valid signatures across the network boundary in order to facilitate convergence. But at least your adversaries can't masquerade as you.
> And do you even still have a government if it can't exercise any significant control over it's territory
Most governments we have today at one point fit that description. The utility of resilience in the face of adversaries that can tamper with your ability to coordinate is not diminished if you're losing the fight.
Don't let tech bros build governments.
These guys clearly read Snowcrash and thought, "man, these corporate city-state enclaves with robot dogs sound like a great idea!"
But don't take my word for why it's bad, there's currently one tech bro proving me right in real time!
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42230966
> All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
> The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.
[…]
> The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”
* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration...