Daily Balajisms – Computable communities

Network unions can provide on-chain community resumes

Balaji Srinivasan thinks crypto can make communities computable and composable. This is the next frontier, after decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized science (DeSci).

I don’t know what the right abbreviation (DeSoc?) for this space can be, but for example Jur is focusing on building solutions for startup societies and positioning itself as DeGov.

Network states, and their prior stages in the form of startup societies, network unions and network archipelagos, aim to make communities computable using cryptography. They provide daily digital calls to action and regular physical meetups. The daily calls to action can be simple tasks like a proof of workout, where you can post a screenshot from your fitness tracker app, and you are awarded points in the chat app and on-chain.

One gets points for participation and crypto bounties for delivering quality work – e.g. creating useful content for community or coding apps. This way a member builds a community resume and gets badges, NFTs, points and earnings – horizontally from other members and vertically from the founders and administrators of a startup society. 

Nassim Taleb in Scala Politica presents his concept of fractal localism as an alternative to the absorbing monolithic nationalism and abstract Kantian universalism that both underpin today’s nation states. His main idea is that politics isn’t scale-free – you can be, at the same time, a libertarian on the federal level, a Republican on the state level, a Democrat on the county level, a socialist on the town level and a communist in your extended family.

This is a very interesting observation, but AI and crypto might challenge and change it. Because these technologies might make it possible to scale previously unviable ideas – in both libertarian and egalitarian directions.

Small sovereign collectives of dozen people can outperform 1000x larger organizations - Instagram vs Kodak moment but on steroids thanks to AI. And egalitarian ideas can scale beyond the extended family and the Dunbar number, because communities can get computable, composable and portable through crypto – allowing for precise tracking of contribution by individual members as well as increasing the ease of exit.

Charter cities, seasteading and micronations, as recent attempts at innovations in nation-building, can become a subroutine of a highly-aligned cloud community, a network union, which needs to prove sufficient traction online, before “printing” itself onto the land, as a network archipelago. In other words, starting a country land-first is a mistake, says Balaji. Because people will ask: “You and what army?”. There needs to be a highly united and vocal community before there can be a country.   

Balaji says that the internet increases variance and retribalizes the world. It can create reverse diasporas. He is also a poly-statist, polytheist (he believes that many religions can coexist like in Singapore) and a polynumist (he is not a bitcoin maximalist). His network states are fractal and nuke-proof. They are also underpinned by cryptohistory and make communities computable and composable – like DeFi and DeSci.

The decentralized versions of AI, Crypto and Social tech can make many ancient ideas and ideals feasible. They can help creating team dashboards and provide cryptographically verifiable on-chain metrics of how the network union progresses in terms of truth, health and wealth.

The idea of collective utilitarianism from ancient Chinese Mohism becomes feasible with new decentralized tech, as communities become computable. Collective utilitarianism is quite different from individual utilitarianism and abstract universalism that underpin movements like Effective Altruism in particular, and the current old establishment in general.

Individual utilitarianism leads to addiction, abstract universalism leads to monoculture. Collective utilitarianism at the scale of sovereign collectives and memetic tribes can be antifragile and fractal.