It's entirely a critique of a person and less so of the concept. And a weak critique as you point out, current american partisan talking points and "evil by association" insinuations via bringing up the political tribe of the article author's boogymen of the day.
If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology.
The ideas of the critiqued person in this piece draw heavily from these ideas, and their writings are less so "one commandment states" and more so an exploration of the types of nation-like organizations that can emerge from some of the new technologies enabled by global networking and Turing complete computation. The critiqued individual predicts the collapse of the state as we know it today, where people are "owned" from birth and resources are owned and managed primarily for the continuation of state power. He sees this as a good thing, a thing that will finally empower human beings to choose their tribe, to form tribes as they see fit, to explore the merits of any and all ideas without taboo, to live their lives autonomously and ultimately live up to each of their own full potential. I generally agree with the premise and related concepts.
I wonder how many proponents of this idea know that it's been done before? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_of_Glarus - Protestants and Catholics had separate governments and tribunals in the same (rather small...) canton in the 17th century.
The summary I read also mentioned that the death penalty required agreement from both groups - highlighting one of the obvious complexities of such a scheme.
That's a small example, limited to very small geography, and is really an example of power struggle than of different groups autonomously governing themselves.
Closer to the mark examples are all over the place with different levels of success. The most prominent are the governance structures of multiculutral and multi religious states of south and southeast Asia, Singapore is a prominent oneone, but India and Bangladesh have also adopted similar models to differing degrees. Basically, where multiple ethicities or religions coexist together, their civil and sometimes even criminal law are the laws of their religions or ethnicities, and only when a dispute is between people of disparate groups does some supreme, secular society wide set of laws apply. There are also examples of this throughout Africa, and truly, this is the way most of the world operated for thousands of years before states had defined borders.
Of course, these aren't truly what we are talking about, they're close, but in my examples there is still an overarching state that is arbiter of last resort, and there is nothing voluntary about the associations, they're usually hereditary and imposed by the state with at most an opt out of tribal/religious law. The concept as noted in the diamond age differs in that associations are voluntary (both on the part of the individual as well as the organization) and prominently, you're subject to the law of those you violate, or, if two members of two different groups are in dispute, the dispute and a resolution are handled diplomatically.
> That's a small example, limited to very small geography, and is really an example of power struggle than of different groups autonomously governing themselves.
Definitely a small geography, and, yes, a solution to a power struggle. I'll point out that large parts of of Europe had rather substantial wars and massacres as part of that specific power struggle, and also that this definitely is "different groups autonomously governing themselves".Landsgemeinde are generally viewed as a prototypical example of that, and there was no significant power over Glarus at that time (the Swiss confederation of that time was extremely far from anything like a central government).
While it sounds anachronistically enlightened (and very close to an actual historical example of what the TFA intended-- it's not very often that we harvest anything from "truth is stranger than [especially science] fiction")--
--the death penalty was applied against witchcraft in 1782??
On the whole Switzerland is (today) sort of a Heinleinian (but regrettably (or unsurprisingly?) not Stephensonian) SF setting: peak humanity in hillbilly country
Gotta wait for our residential citation-fu master to dig that one out, then. A necessary but maybe not sufficient condition for the emergence of such governing structures would be that people grow up rejecting zero-sum status games (including) at the level of tribes. The stopgap solution, constitutional monarchy, fails, because,---? So, I'd say in Gladrus, you already had protestants living in close proximity to Catholics for a handful of centuries .. but the clincher v-a-v the asiatic cases eludes me.
Ime the asiatic cases the "jesus nut" of the system (sovereign, policemen, yeomen, lawyers, judges, etc) are drawn from a single caste. Pace
Manu. Makeup of the branches of government then becomes a emergent symptom. (Compare to western based systems of law.)
Who formed the peacekeeping contingent in Gladrus?
In the meantime, note that CH had a catholic/proddy civil war mid-XIX (Glarus* on the protestant side) but as proof of that humanity it was resolved with only ~100 total deaths, both sides included.
> If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology.
Kudos to Stephenson for inventing a new word that sounds better than the original. Phyles are no different from cliques and suffer from the same problems that cliques do, from an unclear power structure to unwritten rules that are arbitrarily enforced by a capricious "royalty," and in-crowds and out-crowds.
Cliques are great for those inside and terrible for those outside (everyone else). That we have managed to diminish their importance in core pillars of societal function is one of modern civilization's greatest achievements. Going back would not be progress.
We have a world run by cliques right now. Where we had guilds, now we have unions. Corporations, "the intelligence community", "healthcare workers", there are lots of different groups in society that often wild unique, real power and exercise it. What keeps the show going is the illusion of egalitarianism and individualism. When a healthcare company lobbies for laws that make them more money, the healthcare workers clique benefits, so they support it. There are a lot of perverse incentives when you combine cliques and a central lever of power that can be corrupted, not as many when where power resides and where people think it resides look like the same picture.
Freedom of association means that a clique does not have absolute power over you, right? Competition implies that cliques incompatible with most people’s values will wither.
You can possibly live in the same house. It’s a bit like changing your insurance company or gym membership but with much larger consequences, if I understand the concept correctly (I’ve never read the novels mentioned).
I have no problem with cliques by way of freedom of association. But we have tried running society through cliques, and in all cases, what you end up with are variations of the mafia or worse.
Modern colleges, startup incubators, professional associations are some examples of cliques that are better than mafia. I guess a key is that these cliques do not completely encompass every aspect of a member's life and do not use violence as a means to enforce their rules.
In practice cliques have the same benefits to agglomeration that e.g. corporations and proto-governments do. So freedom of association can’t exist in practice for very long, at least not freedom to associate with multiple effectively-equal cliques.
Cliques will certainly differ from one another and are likely to be unequal, much like “soft cliques” already exist today in larger cities. The question is more about how much power a clique should have and how exclusive and encompassing its membership should be, e.g., whether a person can belong to multiple cliques.
The issue (and why states exist) is that powerful cliques end up doing bad things to other less powerful cliques, and usually the dimension of “power” that matters is not the one that you want actually making decisions broadly (e.g. who can be the most brutal and aggressive toward outsiders).
You know Snow Crash was a dystopia, right? He wasn't suggesting we should actually do this , he was pointing out the dire consequences of heading in the direction we were/are travelling.
Diamond Age was presented as less of a dystopia, all those Vickies living in nice places. But the early part of Nell's story is bleak af. Is this really what we want for our future?
This is the Torment Nexus that we were supposed to not be building. It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it.
> It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it.
Yeah it's really scary to me that people are taking all this fiction with bad lessons and trying to make it happen. It feels like they wanna make even more explicit panopticon and call it the eye of sauron.
I didn't get that reading from it at all, just that it was the state of the world in the story and it had it's benefits and downsides like anything else. It wasn't so much a dystopia than a prediction of where our networking, compute and cryptography technology would take the international power structure. I think a part of the depiction was that power structures and hierarchies are emergent and are not symptoms of a dysfunctional social system, and that no matter what the structure of a society is, hierarchies form and injustice still occurs.
The reality I want for humanity is one where we aren't born partially enslaved, which almost all human beings are currently. A world of power structures, but where people can choose their tribe, where we aren't subject to the dictates of others as a consequence of the coordinates where we are born, would be a much more free world.
The protagonists (literally Protagonist in Snow Crash) got to choose because they're connected, wealthy individuals with relevant skills. It's a very privileged viewpoint.
Nell's folks did not get to choose. The implicit dystopia is that of Nell's folks, who don't have skills, don't have connections, and have no way of getting out of their shitty situation.
The flip side of flexible nationality is if you're unwanted. Can nations choose to eject natural-born citizens who will incur too much medical cost during their lives? Or people who don't fit the nation's norms of sexuality, gender identity, religion, whatever? Can you suddenly find yourself ejected from your nation because an algorithm detects something in your profile?
Possibly an argument can be made that forced nationality based on geography tends to make those things less likely than they are in Stephenson’s fictional world.
but this doesn't work both ways. in order to be able to freely choose which group to join, no group must be allowed to reject me. otherwise we will end up with a numer of people that are rejected everywhere.
it most not be allowed to remove people from a group, but, if they violate rules they must be given a chance to rehabilitate themselves.
we already have to many people who can't find a group where they are being accepted the way they are, and such a system would only increase that number.
there has to be a balance between both. certain rules depend on the location where i am, and other rules may depend on the culture, and yet again others depend on the family.
i am absolutely for the abolishment of nation states, but we can't abolish local rules. we could reduce some of them though.
> in order to be able to freely choose which group to join, no group must be allowed to reject me.
That's not how free association works. Both the individual and the group, each according to their own criteria, determine if they want to associate with one another.
The same point applies to many of your other arguments.
I don't really think it would increase the number of people who are left behind. There are many left behind people all over the world who on paper have states they belong to, but which the rules of those states leave them cut out of any real participation. If they could participate in whatever groups they currently belong to, with full sovereignty rather than under a state attempting to destroy these groups and subsume them, I think those people would be better off. And, for those few that are unwanted by anyone, much fewer than there are now in a state dominated environment, they can always choose to associate with one another.
There will be rules based on location no matter what you do. You don't need a state for that. People live in places, and they have customs and etiquette and rules of decorum. You probably won't be able to walk around naked in Kabul no matter whether there's a state or not.
There will be rules based on location no matter what you do. You don't need a state for that. People live in places, and they have customs and etiquette and rules of decorum. You probably won't be able to walk around naked in Kabul no matter whether there's a state or not.
the state is needed to protect this person from undue punishment and give them a fair trial. the same goes for benign things like traffic violations or for murder. the moment where a rule violation crosses multiple groups you get an issue with jurisdiction. the only way to resolve that is by having an entity governing rules for the locality. otherwise justice can't be enforced.
now again, we don't need the nation states from today to do that. a global system would be better, but we still need local enforcement and local influence over what the rules are. there is simply no way around that if we want to protect all individuals in a location.
in general when it comes to enforcement of rules and punishment, the only groups that will survive will be faith based ones, because for any other group people will simply leave if they feel they are not being treated fairly. we can already see that with the controversies around some code of conduct violations. only the people who have a big stake in the group or depend on the group will accept any punishment. others will just give up and find another group.
the only way to avoid that is to have justice be handled by an independent institution. it can't come from the group itself, or we make it difficult to switch groups.
That's not how free association works. Both the individual and the group, each according to their own criteria, determine if they want to associate with one another.
i know that. my point is that absolute free association is not a good idea because it will create a group of outcasts that noone wants to associate with. but that is something that we must not allow to happen.
And, for those few that are unwanted by anyone, much fewer than there are now in a state dominated environment, they can always choose to associate with one another.
no they can't. similar to the quote "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" those outcasts will all be different and many won't want to associate with each other.
i am actually experiencing this frequently as an expat. although being welcomed, i am often treated as an outsider, and i have no interest to associate with other expats either. while there still exists groups that i can associate with, i am sure there are people that noone wants to associate with, and we can't allow to let these people be left behind.
there isn't really any meat in this essay. it's lazy, vague, and abstract. the reader is left still not really understanding what a network society is
It's entirely a critique of a person and less so of the concept. And a weak critique as you point out, current american partisan talking points and "evil by association" insinuations via bringing up the political tribe of the article author's boogymen of the day.
If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology.
The ideas of the critiqued person in this piece draw heavily from these ideas, and their writings are less so "one commandment states" and more so an exploration of the types of nation-like organizations that can emerge from some of the new technologies enabled by global networking and Turing complete computation. The critiqued individual predicts the collapse of the state as we know it today, where people are "owned" from birth and resources are owned and managed primarily for the continuation of state power. He sees this as a good thing, a thing that will finally empower human beings to choose their tribe, to form tribes as they see fit, to explore the merits of any and all ideas without taboo, to live their lives autonomously and ultimately live up to each of their own full potential. I generally agree with the premise and related concepts.
I wonder how many proponents of this idea know that it's been done before? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_of_Glarus - Protestants and Catholics had separate governments and tribunals in the same (rather small...) canton in the 17th century.
The summary I read also mentioned that the death penalty required agreement from both groups - highlighting one of the obvious complexities of such a scheme.
edit: a bit more detail
That's a small example, limited to very small geography, and is really an example of power struggle than of different groups autonomously governing themselves.
Closer to the mark examples are all over the place with different levels of success. The most prominent are the governance structures of multiculutral and multi religious states of south and southeast Asia, Singapore is a prominent oneone, but India and Bangladesh have also adopted similar models to differing degrees. Basically, where multiple ethicities or religions coexist together, their civil and sometimes even criminal law are the laws of their religions or ethnicities, and only when a dispute is between people of disparate groups does some supreme, secular society wide set of laws apply. There are also examples of this throughout Africa, and truly, this is the way most of the world operated for thousands of years before states had defined borders.
Of course, these aren't truly what we are talking about, they're close, but in my examples there is still an overarching state that is arbiter of last resort, and there is nothing voluntary about the associations, they're usually hereditary and imposed by the state with at most an opt out of tribal/religious law. The concept as noted in the diamond age differs in that associations are voluntary (both on the part of the individual as well as the organization) and prominently, you're subject to the law of those you violate, or, if two members of two different groups are in dispute, the dispute and a resolution are handled diplomatically.
> That's a small example, limited to very small geography, and is really an example of power struggle than of different groups autonomously governing themselves.
Definitely a small geography, and, yes, a solution to a power struggle. I'll point out that large parts of of Europe had rather substantial wars and massacres as part of that specific power struggle, and also that this definitely is "different groups autonomously governing themselves".Landsgemeinde are generally viewed as a prototypical example of that, and there was no significant power over Glarus at that time (the Swiss confederation of that time was extremely far from anything like a central government).
A link to the summary? This sounds interesting.
While it sounds anachronistically enlightened (and very close to an actual historical example of what the TFA intended-- it's not very often that we harvest anything from "truth is stranger than [especially science] fiction")--
On the whole Switzerland is (today) sort of a Heinleinian (but regrettably (or unsurprisingly?) not Stephensonian) SF setting: peak humanity in hillbilly country> A link to the summary?
Sorry, it was in a museum - https://www.freulerpalast.ch/, which doesn't look like it has that much information online.
Gotta wait for our residential citation-fu master to dig that one out, then. A necessary but maybe not sufficient condition for the emergence of such governing structures would be that people grow up rejecting zero-sum status games (including) at the level of tribes. The stopgap solution, constitutional monarchy, fails, because,---? So, I'd say in Gladrus, you already had protestants living in close proximity to Catholics for a handful of centuries .. but the clincher v-a-v the asiatic cases eludes me.
Ime the asiatic cases the "jesus nut" of the system (sovereign, policemen, yeomen, lawyers, judges, etc) are drawn from a single caste. Pace Manu. Makeup of the branches of government then becomes a emergent symptom. (Compare to western based systems of law.)
Who formed the peacekeeping contingent in Gladrus?
Low B/W ATM, may be a while...
In the meantime, note that CH had a catholic/proddy civil war mid-XIX (Glarus* on the protestant side) but as proof of that humanity it was resolved with only ~100 total deaths, both sides included.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Son...
compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Rel...
* for some reason, only cantons with non-human animals on their flags have visible genitalia, so the flag of Glarus is penis-free.
EDIT: note also that in "modern federal" CH, almost all the tax burden is canton and commune, not confederation.
Pillarization is one term used for countries with vertically integrated sub societies based on religious and other affiliation.
> If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology.
Kudos to Stephenson for inventing a new word that sounds better than the original. Phyles are no different from cliques and suffer from the same problems that cliques do, from an unclear power structure to unwritten rules that are arbitrarily enforced by a capricious "royalty," and in-crowds and out-crowds.
Cliques are great for those inside and terrible for those outside (everyone else). That we have managed to diminish their importance in core pillars of societal function is one of modern civilization's greatest achievements. Going back would not be progress.
We have a world run by cliques right now. Where we had guilds, now we have unions. Corporations, "the intelligence community", "healthcare workers", there are lots of different groups in society that often wild unique, real power and exercise it. What keeps the show going is the illusion of egalitarianism and individualism. When a healthcare company lobbies for laws that make them more money, the healthcare workers clique benefits, so they support it. There are a lot of perverse incentives when you combine cliques and a central lever of power that can be corrupted, not as many when where power resides and where people think it resides look like the same picture.
Freedom of association means that a clique does not have absolute power over you, right? Competition implies that cliques incompatible with most people’s values will wither.
You can possibly live in the same house. It’s a bit like changing your insurance company or gym membership but with much larger consequences, if I understand the concept correctly (I’ve never read the novels mentioned).
I have no problem with cliques by way of freedom of association. But we have tried running society through cliques, and in all cases, what you end up with are variations of the mafia or worse.
Modern colleges, startup incubators, professional associations are some examples of cliques that are better than mafia. I guess a key is that these cliques do not completely encompass every aspect of a member's life and do not use violence as a means to enforce their rules.
In practice cliques have the same benefits to agglomeration that e.g. corporations and proto-governments do. So freedom of association can’t exist in practice for very long, at least not freedom to associate with multiple effectively-equal cliques.
Cliques will certainly differ from one another and are likely to be unequal, much like “soft cliques” already exist today in larger cities. The question is more about how much power a clique should have and how exclusive and encompassing its membership should be, e.g., whether a person can belong to multiple cliques.
The issue (and why states exist) is that powerful cliques end up doing bad things to other less powerful cliques, and usually the dimension of “power” that matters is not the one that you want actually making decisions broadly (e.g. who can be the most brutal and aggressive toward outsiders).
Pillarization died for a reason.
You know Snow Crash was a dystopia, right? He wasn't suggesting we should actually do this , he was pointing out the dire consequences of heading in the direction we were/are travelling.
Diamond Age was presented as less of a dystopia, all those Vickies living in nice places. But the early part of Nell's story is bleak af. Is this really what we want for our future?
This is the Torment Nexus that we were supposed to not be building. It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it.
> It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it.
Yeah it's really scary to me that people are taking all this fiction with bad lessons and trying to make it happen. It feels like they wanna make even more explicit panopticon and call it the eye of sauron.
Reminds me of: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
Thanks for the link to The Torment Nexus talk :) I forgot who came up with that
I didn't get that reading from it at all, just that it was the state of the world in the story and it had it's benefits and downsides like anything else. It wasn't so much a dystopia than a prediction of where our networking, compute and cryptography technology would take the international power structure. I think a part of the depiction was that power structures and hierarchies are emergent and are not symptoms of a dysfunctional social system, and that no matter what the structure of a society is, hierarchies form and injustice still occurs.
The reality I want for humanity is one where we aren't born partially enslaved, which almost all human beings are currently. A world of power structures, but where people can choose their tribe, where we aren't subject to the dictates of others as a consequence of the coordinates where we are born, would be a much more free world.
The protagonists (literally Protagonist in Snow Crash) got to choose because they're connected, wealthy individuals with relevant skills. It's a very privileged viewpoint.
Nell's folks did not get to choose. The implicit dystopia is that of Nell's folks, who don't have skills, don't have connections, and have no way of getting out of their shitty situation.
The flip side of flexible nationality is if you're unwanted. Can nations choose to eject natural-born citizens who will incur too much medical cost during their lives? Or people who don't fit the nation's norms of sexuality, gender identity, religion, whatever? Can you suddenly find yourself ejected from your nation because an algorithm detects something in your profile?
Nations can and have done all those things.
Possibly an argument can be made that forced nationality based on geography tends to make those things less likely than they are in Stephenson’s fictional world.
but this doesn't work both ways. in order to be able to freely choose which group to join, no group must be allowed to reject me. otherwise we will end up with a numer of people that are rejected everywhere.
it most not be allowed to remove people from a group, but, if they violate rules they must be given a chance to rehabilitate themselves.
we already have to many people who can't find a group where they are being accepted the way they are, and such a system would only increase that number.
there has to be a balance between both. certain rules depend on the location where i am, and other rules may depend on the culture, and yet again others depend on the family.
i am absolutely for the abolishment of nation states, but we can't abolish local rules. we could reduce some of them though.
> in order to be able to freely choose which group to join, no group must be allowed to reject me.
That's not how free association works. Both the individual and the group, each according to their own criteria, determine if they want to associate with one another.
The same point applies to many of your other arguments.
I don't really think it would increase the number of people who are left behind. There are many left behind people all over the world who on paper have states they belong to, but which the rules of those states leave them cut out of any real participation. If they could participate in whatever groups they currently belong to, with full sovereignty rather than under a state attempting to destroy these groups and subsume them, I think those people would be better off. And, for those few that are unwanted by anyone, much fewer than there are now in a state dominated environment, they can always choose to associate with one another.
There will be rules based on location no matter what you do. You don't need a state for that. People live in places, and they have customs and etiquette and rules of decorum. You probably won't be able to walk around naked in Kabul no matter whether there's a state or not.
There will be rules based on location no matter what you do. You don't need a state for that. People live in places, and they have customs and etiquette and rules of decorum. You probably won't be able to walk around naked in Kabul no matter whether there's a state or not.
the state is needed to protect this person from undue punishment and give them a fair trial. the same goes for benign things like traffic violations or for murder. the moment where a rule violation crosses multiple groups you get an issue with jurisdiction. the only way to resolve that is by having an entity governing rules for the locality. otherwise justice can't be enforced.
now again, we don't need the nation states from today to do that. a global system would be better, but we still need local enforcement and local influence over what the rules are. there is simply no way around that if we want to protect all individuals in a location.
in general when it comes to enforcement of rules and punishment, the only groups that will survive will be faith based ones, because for any other group people will simply leave if they feel they are not being treated fairly. we can already see that with the controversies around some code of conduct violations. only the people who have a big stake in the group or depend on the group will accept any punishment. others will just give up and find another group.
the only way to avoid that is to have justice be handled by an independent institution. it can't come from the group itself, or we make it difficult to switch groups.
That's not how free association works. Both the individual and the group, each according to their own criteria, determine if they want to associate with one another.
i know that. my point is that absolute free association is not a good idea because it will create a group of outcasts that noone wants to associate with. but that is something that we must not allow to happen.
And, for those few that are unwanted by anyone, much fewer than there are now in a state dominated environment, they can always choose to associate with one another.
no they can't. similar to the quote "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" those outcasts will all be different and many won't want to associate with each other.
i am actually experiencing this frequently as an expat. although being welcomed, i am often treated as an outsider, and i have no interest to associate with other expats either. while there still exists groups that i can associate with, i am sure there are people that noone wants to associate with, and we can't allow to let these people be left behind.
s/network/
I only needed to read the last 2-3 sentences of this hit piece to determine its value.
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