A legal system (mediated by crypto-style mechanisms or otherwise) seems to be far downstream of social/moral/norm cohesion even (perhaps especially) if there is a tradeable financial interest in participating, as you point out. Large corporations have been more successful at building an inside-the-state legal system than crypto networks, in part because they require ongoing actions from their members, rather than mere financial market style hodling. Religions and political parties also have had some success in building non-state societies, but they also seem to be lower-commitment than corporations, with a shibboleth-hodl-enunciation required only a few times/year in many cases. Families are a higher-commitment framework with lower rates of layoffs and basically unsaleable tokens (you can even lose your stake if you piss off whoever's writing the will). To what degree do you think western society's people are too obsessed with free-market-style membership in most groups to join networks that would be sufficiently costly/constraining to develop cohesion and implement governance? Do you think a sort of generally anti-group ideology is part of the reason why crypto networks are trying to attract people as investors first?
I think (and I'll describe this in a subsequent post) professional societies might be an additional use case. Professional ethics/standards are already quite important to many professionals, but aside from state-licensed professions there's not much in the way of enforcement. There's already some shared culture between members of a profession, and there's a shared interest in being able to credibly claim to meet certain high standards of behavior.
I don't think "free markets" necessarily go with "anti-group ideology" -- consider 19th century America, where voluntary societies were extremely popular, and (apart from slavery) markets were about as free as they've ever gotten in the real world.
I think crypto networks are started in a particular environment, where a.) cryptocurrencies are primarily speculative assets and empirically go up a lot, and b.) the crypto community has a lot of software people. So that leads to the spotlight being on "how do we build the software" and "how can people make money here" as opposed to "how do we build an actual distinct self-governing subculture". Like, the video in the link is about a "community" DAO that has no theme; it's just a financial scheme plus some social stuff like dinner parties. That's less "community" than the ACX blog comments section!
Do you have any other-than-Tocqueville book recommendations on the 19th century American economy? It's a bit of a dark spot for me before the gilded age, and might perhaps help me have a better frame for our less-associative contemporary world than just punching on free markets.
Haha yesss, such a concise analysis of crypto-style community building.
I haven't participated personally but I recently watched this retrospective on participating in a paid coin community from someone I think is reasonably neutral. She ended up selling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkf0yoLsjgs
The network state. Another thing it seems I have independently invented. Although until now I had never considered of combining it with blockchain tech.
Ultimately I don't think blockchain tech will work out, trust based systems are simply far more efficient than trustless systems and will therefore outcompete them.
I would expect network states to gain sovereignty in about 200 years. We have not even completed the transition of prevailing sovereignty form from empires to nation states yet. And of course there will need to be broad economic equality between all parts of the world first.
The idea of moral systems and how they originated is an interest of mine. One of the points I was trying to make here is Hobbes' as well - the idea that a moral system is not possible without enforcement. Hobbes was wrong to see the required enforcement in morality as the sovereign monarch. Instead, morality is a publicly understood system of don'ts that is enforced by collective participation. Your examples support this because they are cases where offenders are ostrasized - eg. responsibility rests with everyone who makes up the collective, and is not institutionalized in a specialized force.
Except for Iceland, which is an isolated island, and Somaliland, which might have been a precursor to a state, your examples exist within states or are dependent on states. One could define ostracism as a form of collective force - a more participatory version of the state's monopoly, in the sense that every member can or does participate in enforcing the rulings. Scale is important here. If the society is small enough, everyone knows everyone else by sight, and collective participation is all that is needed. In larger societies, centralization of government, and the institutionalization of policing and legal systems are required.
My post didn't deal with whether states are needed in general.
My point was to argue that an effective non-state legal system can function, either inside a state or in the absence of a state. In practice, today almost everyone on Earth lives within a state's jurisdiction, so the "non-state legal systems within a surrounding state" case is the important one.
Sarah, I have not read David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, but how large of a group was this non-state court able to manage? I wonder if such a system begins to break down around Dunbar's Number?
A legal system (mediated by crypto-style mechanisms or otherwise) seems to be far downstream of social/moral/norm cohesion even (perhaps especially) if there is a tradeable financial interest in participating, as you point out. Large corporations have been more successful at building an inside-the-state legal system than crypto networks, in part because they require ongoing actions from their members, rather than mere financial market style hodling. Religions and political parties also have had some success in building non-state societies, but they also seem to be lower-commitment than corporations, with a shibboleth-hodl-enunciation required only a few times/year in many cases. Families are a higher-commitment framework with lower rates of layoffs and basically unsaleable tokens (you can even lose your stake if you piss off whoever's writing the will). To what degree do you think western society's people are too obsessed with free-market-style membership in most groups to join networks that would be sufficiently costly/constraining to develop cohesion and implement governance? Do you think a sort of generally anti-group ideology is part of the reason why crypto networks are trying to attract people as investors first?
I think (and I'll describe this in a subsequent post) professional societies might be an additional use case. Professional ethics/standards are already quite important to many professionals, but aside from state-licensed professions there's not much in the way of enforcement. There's already some shared culture between members of a profession, and there's a shared interest in being able to credibly claim to meet certain high standards of behavior.
I don't think "free markets" necessarily go with "anti-group ideology" -- consider 19th century America, where voluntary societies were extremely popular, and (apart from slavery) markets were about as free as they've ever gotten in the real world.
I think crypto networks are started in a particular environment, where a.) cryptocurrencies are primarily speculative assets and empirically go up a lot, and b.) the crypto community has a lot of software people. So that leads to the spotlight being on "how do we build the software" and "how can people make money here" as opposed to "how do we build an actual distinct self-governing subculture". Like, the video in the link is about a "community" DAO that has no theme; it's just a financial scheme plus some social stuff like dinner parties. That's less "community" than the ACX blog comments section!
Very interested to read your future post on professional associations; have been in close touch with IEEE (the engineering society/standards org) for many years. And they have an interesting lineage, going back to guilds (great, if nerdy read on guild insurance programs: https://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-abstract/49/3/484/49522/Mutual-Insurance-1550-2015-From-Guild-Welfare-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext).
Do you have any other-than-Tocqueville book recommendations on the 19th century American economy? It's a bit of a dark spot for me before the gilded age, and might perhaps help me have a better frame for our less-associative contemporary world than just punching on free markets.
Haha yesss, such a concise analysis of crypto-style community building.
I haven't participated personally but I recently watched this retrospective on participating in a paid coin community from someone I think is reasonably neutral. She ended up selling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkf0yoLsjgs
The network state. Another thing it seems I have independently invented. Although until now I had never considered of combining it with blockchain tech.
Ultimately I don't think blockchain tech will work out, trust based systems are simply far more efficient than trustless systems and will therefore outcompete them.
I would expect network states to gain sovereignty in about 200 years. We have not even completed the transition of prevailing sovereignty form from empires to nation states yet. And of course there will need to be broad economic equality between all parts of the world first.
The idea of moral systems and how they originated is an interest of mine. One of the points I was trying to make here is Hobbes' as well - the idea that a moral system is not possible without enforcement. Hobbes was wrong to see the required enforcement in morality as the sovereign monarch. Instead, morality is a publicly understood system of don'ts that is enforced by collective participation. Your examples support this because they are cases where offenders are ostrasized - eg. responsibility rests with everyone who makes up the collective, and is not institutionalized in a specialized force.
Except for Iceland, which is an isolated island, and Somaliland, which might have been a precursor to a state, your examples exist within states or are dependent on states. One could define ostracism as a form of collective force - a more participatory version of the state's monopoly, in the sense that every member can or does participate in enforcing the rulings. Scale is important here. If the society is small enough, everyone knows everyone else by sight, and collective participation is all that is needed. In larger societies, centralization of government, and the institutionalization of policing and legal systems are required.
My post didn't deal with whether states are needed in general.
My point was to argue that an effective non-state legal system can function, either inside a state or in the absence of a state. In practice, today almost everyone on Earth lives within a state's jurisdiction, so the "non-state legal systems within a surrounding state" case is the important one.
Sarah, I have not read David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, but how large of a group was this non-state court able to manage? I wonder if such a system begins to break down around Dunbar's Number?
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1058150/FULLTEXT01.pdf Medieval Iceland had a population of 50,000-60,000. Well over "Dunbar's Number" (which I think is fake anyway -- it's derived from the size of ape social groups, not human ones).