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")--
--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
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
s/network/
[dead]