What do I think about network states?

I'm generally in the first camp; I am concerned about the prospect of both the West and China settling into a kind of low-growth conservatism, I love how imperfect coordination between nation states limits the enforceability of things like global copyright law, and I'm concerned about the possibility that, with future surveillance technology, the w... See more

[3] is of course a more complicated moral question: whether you view paralysis and creep toward de-facto authoritarian global government as a bigger problem or someone inventing an evil technology that dooms us all as a bigger problem. 

If governance ideas are regularly implemented in network states, then we would move from an extrovert-privileging "talker liberalism" to a more balanced "doer liberalism" where ideas rise and fall based on how well they actually do on a small scale. 

[2] is exciting because it fixes a major problem in politics: unlike startups, where the early stage of the process looks somewhat like a mini version of the later stage, in politics the early stage is a public discourse game that often selects for very different things than what actually work in practice. 

We don't just want to take existing maps of social connections as given and find better ways to come to consensus within them. We also want to reform the webs of social connections themselves , and put people closer to other people that are more compatible with them to better allow different ways of life to maintain their own distinctiveness.

I think there is an important idea hidden in [1]: while the "social technology" community has come up with many good ideas around better governance, and many good ideas around better public discussion, there is a missing emphasis on better social technology for sorting . 

3) Pushing against regulatory conservatism in general, by increasing the chance that there's some jurisdiction that will let you do any particular thing. Allowing people to opt into network states that accept higher levels of risk could be a successful strategy for pushing against this.

2) Creating new regulatory institutions that might be more efficient at serving the same priorities as the status quo.

There are three ways that you can interpret the underlying goal here:1) Creating new regulatory environments that let their residents have different priorities from the priorities preferred by the mainstream.