A More Dynamic World
How can you make yourself better? Not easy, but relatively clear and straightforward. How can you positively influence the people in your life? Even less obvious and easy, but possible and clearly within your sphere of influence. How can you improve your community? This is where things can get murky and motivation wanes. What is even the right level to look at? Your neighborhood, or maybe your town or city? As the scale increases the likelihood of making a difference decreases. When you live in a bitterly divided society it is even harder to make a difference. Many competent, hopeful people have been driven to despair trying to fix San Francisco, which actually looks united from the outside!
You can zoom further out, to your country and finally to the world. By the time you’re talking about changing the world, your level of influence starts to feel hopelessly low. Even changing a big, divided country like the US seems far-fetched. Those spheres are so big that changing them seems impossible.
There just generally doesn’t seem to be a clear trend of progress on a large scale. Is anybody changing the world for the better? Why believe that you can make things better on a large scale when so few are? Right now, it just seems to be really hard to generate and assiduously pursue an ambitious, positive vision. It takes a very special person, an Elon Musk. There is a dearth of impactful projects and an excess of time killing and complaining.
Can human agency be increased? Could we get more people engaged in meaningful, valuable projects? What is the way forward, from stagnation into dynamism? Maybe the next step is to better organize people at the community level. Thanks to the Internet, individuals are now empowered to discover and get involved in a million different things like never before, but collaborating on large projects is still hard.
What kind of organization is actually working in the 21st century in the US? The obvious answer is technology companies. They are the engines of progress now. Our public institutions seem to have devolved into stasis. There are few effective organizations. How can there be more? What if humans sorted themselves into a thousand purposeful groups, each with a different bold vision of a better world, competing, collaborating, and learning from each other?
Balaji Srinivasan has been advancing the highly original and intriguing concept of The Network State. The idea is to evolve from loose, disorganized online communities to purposeful cloud-first societies that can change the world by modeling a moral innovation. An example would be a keto community whose moral innovation would be increasing the well-being of its members through a contrarian diet.
Why now? New technologies like cryptocurrencies and VR make global collaboration easier than ever, allowing not just corporations but any group of people to gather and build together. Srinivasan imagines globally distributed network state citizens designing buildings in VR, prototyping their community in a private slice of the Metaverse, then crowdfunding and finally building it in the real world. The progress of the network state would be tracked on a dashboard with “a cryptographically auditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population, income, and real-estate footprint.” It’s nation-building, made accessible through the incredible advances in technology in recent decades.
So far, the Internet has enabled humans to scatter into a thousand new belief systems but hasn’t yet enabled them to really experiment with those belief systems with a blank slate. The network state concept builds on what is working right now (aligned tech-enabled organizations, best exemplified by the great tech companies of the 21st century) and extrapolates forward to provide a playbook for creating better societies.
People have a lot of ideas about how things should work, but they can’t quite find a way to really try them. We have sorted ourselves into new proposition-based online communities (Bitcoin maximalists, woke, etc.) and are now trying to reshape existing places that contain people of many different beliefs. But we are perpetually frustrated.
Even one of the most uniformly progressive cities in the US, San Francisco, couldn’t put up with a full term of ultra-progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin. There is always the excuse, sometimes comical, that the other side is sabotaging the movement (it was commonly claimed that San Francisco right-wingers sabotaged Boudin’s social justice revolution!)
On the other side, there is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis saying Florida is “where woke goes to die.” Clearly, people have sharply differing ideas of how they want society to function, which are hard to accomplish in a big, diverse state like Florida, or even a relatively small and uniform city like San Francisco.
We need to try these new ideas out. People need to be able to try to reshape a corner of the world into their ideal. And if it works, it will spread. If it doesn’t, it won’t go anywhere. Ultimately, we’ll be moving forward, iterating on the ideal forms of society, not stuck in endless acrimonious arguments on Twitter.