Network utilitarianism

Maximizing agency, alignment and authenticity in the network age.

In the network age we experience digital(ly native) politics. Things that appear first online go from zero to one. Legacy institutions go from one to zero. All that is solid melts into air. The ascending and declining worlds are fractal - parts of San Francisco can feel like both.

Words are cheap, Elons are scarce. Network utilitarianism combines the good parts of state consequentialism and individual utilitarianism into a philosophy that serves the network (states and age).

Fractal frontiers are built through proof-of-work politics and grand “glue gestures”, as opposed to scissor statements that cut communities in half. We get ASAP Asabiyya that unifies counter-elites across memetic and political tribes - like after Trump got shot during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Both one-to-n and zero-to-one are important. Copying and creating. Culture and tech. Process and event. Continuity and (a)symmetry. Hero worship is the weakness of the red tribe. The blue tribe is full of NPCs, heirs, and Paper Belt bureaucrats, but its power lies in decentralization across legacy institutions and across the Atlantic. The grey tribe has both the heroes in tech founders and decentralization across startups and industries.

Individual utilitarianism leads to addiction and San Francisco politics. This is the flaw in Effective Altruism, with SBF and his FTX as a prime example. EA wanted to test UBI in Africa, but FTX scammed Africans, stole their money and donated them to friends in rich places like Oxford and DC. Plus EA turned into a doom cult of AI decels a few years ago. Sad.

Network utilitarianism is closer to effective accelerationism (e/acc) as a counter-movement to EA. But it represents a post-posthumanist turn. Abundant energy and AI are important and humanism is not enough. But terraforming and regeneration are two sides of the same coin. Monism vs dualism of mind and body.

Another bug in the Western thought is universalism, which leads to SF politics being exported to the whole world and its critics censored on an industrial scale. “Seeing like a state” is oppressive and not enough, we need “learning like a machine”. AI can reform the declining Western states, but should serve as a tutor, a couch and an opt-in smart regulator for individuals and communities. Not an all-seeing global censor.

Collective utilitarianism or state consequentialism in the ancient Mohism is an interesting precursor to EA that is more scalable and focuses on improving lives and reducing harms on a societal level. But it also has a bug of universalism (which like Communism doesn’t scale).

The Asian culture of dashboard management, we have experienced a bit during Covid with daily updates on health statistics, and team dashboards in tech companies are practical examples that have similar logic to Mohism.

Nassim Taleb explains that the flaw of modern Western states is twofold - the all-absorbing monolithic nationalism and abstract Kantian universalism.

The State is the Leviathan from the industrial age that replaced the God-shaped hole after the old agrarian regimes fell with the rise of the printing press and modern bureaucracies. As Balaji Srinivasan explains, Nietzsche proclaimed God is dead, because the elites of his day stopped believing in him. Balaji sees three Leviathans that dominated throughout history - God, State, Network.

Balaji sees a nation as a densely connected subgraph of a social network. His network state concept that he explained in a book, is an effective fusion of two Leviathans - the State and the Network. Anyone with a laptop and a moral innovation can start a startup society. The next step is a highly-aligned online community - the network union. If the community is printed onto the land and acquires real estate, it reaches the level of the network archipelago. Once it achieves some form of diplomatic recognition we can call it a network state. In the same way bitcoin was once listed on Bloomberg and got recognition from a fiat institution - a crypto country needs recognition from a legacy fiat country.

Balaji proposes the motto of truth, health, wealth as the new “liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Network state aspiring entities can act as “fractal frontiers” for moral innovations that are relevant for these values.

Elon Musk clearly sees a truth-seeking AI as his moonshot. AI tutors can be a digital Aristotle for everyone. And free and open generative AI can help people from all around the world to tell their stories.

Health can be pursued through non-entropic social media (which focus on work as opposed to heat/distractions) that serve a particular community, with a longevity or biohacking focus, and where members engage in “proof of workout”.

Wealth can be stored in crypto and earned by investing and crypto tasking - today there are very young coding influencers on Replit, who come from places like India and code even on their mobile phones. If in 1800s everyone was a farmer, in 1900s everyone was a worker, in this century everyone will be an investor, thinks Balaji Srinivasan.

Free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech should push the Pareto-frontier and maximize individual agency, alignment and authenticity at the same time, while preserving, innovating and regenerating networked communities across time and space. Quality, quantity and duration of relationships and interactions matter. Completing the social graph is the game. Getting to Mars is the game. Regeneration means terraforming (Mars, deserts).