Translation: Secret Societies, Internet State, Burning Man Festival, ZUZALU—Thoughts on New Political Communities

Secret Societies, Network States, Burning Man, ZUZALU, and More: Thoughts on New Political Communities

Original link: SECRET SOCIETIES, NETWORK STATES, BURNING MAN, ZUZALU, AND MORE: THOUGHTS ON NEW POLITICAL COMMUNITIES

Author: Matt Prewitt Matt. Privit CC-BY 4.0

August 22, 2023

Matt Prewitt is the chairman of the RadicalxChange Foundation. He has been an antitrust and consumer class action attorney and federal court clerk in the past, and is now an author and blockchain industry consultant. This article has been translated and released in CC-BY 4.0 format with the authorization of the author.

Translation: mashbean, Frank Hu, Tai-Jung Yang, Vivian Chen, Liying Wang, Chao-Ming Teng, Beatrice Liao, Jiahe Lin, Gimmy Chang
This translation group is web3 for all reading club

Sociologist George. Simmel wrote a wonderful paper in 1906 called The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies . The article is really difficult to read, the sentences are long and extremely dense, and the English translation of the paper retains the flavor of classical academic German.

If you read carefully, you will join a small group of people who share Simmel's extraordinary insights into the role of secrets in social relationships, from friendship and marriage to the state. Most of Simmel's readers are strangers to each other, but if any of them are reading this, I invite them to contact me by e-mail. A meaningful relationship may be born, as Simmel said, the knowledge shared between friends, although not widely known , underpins many of the strongest social ties.

In addition to sharing private knowledge, strong communities are often communities of shared destiny, with mutual commitments or common obligations. Commitments, obligations, destiny, etc., may seem elusive and difficult to quantify, but they may indeed be related, such as unsecured trust and breakups that require payment . We should pay more attention to such indicators, more on which follows.

Recently, a new wave of community initiatives is booming and attracting attention, such as Zuzalu, Network Nation, the intentional community built by the friends of Ezra Klein , etc. The origins of these passions can be traced back to the 20th century before the advent of Burning Man, such as the back-to-the-land movement, and even earlier to the secret sects and cults of the 19th century. How should we view these new attempts? Do they have what it takes to succeed? If successful, will they be good for the world?

Let's start with some basic classifications. Most new movements, like their predecessors, are difficult to neatly classify politically. They are all some form of modified liberalism, but some are more conservative and others strive to practice progressive liberalism. I find that "new community" advocates can be roughly divided into three categories, and although they often intermingle, they may not always agree with each other.

Affinity-communitarians with shared values

In the 1960s and 1970s, back-to-nature people who were tired of certain aspects of mainstream society, such as capitalism and militarism, wanted to live in smaller communities with people more similar to them. Their descendants are still numerous today. The passion behind them has nothing to do with left or right: communities with common values ​​can be primitive, traditional, tribal, and conservative, or they can be avant-garde, liberal, and progressive. This makes sense, since isolation can encourage a return to past traditions (whether real or imagined), and can also breed new advances or boldly transgressive social complexes. Such communities have specific values ​​and thrive outside mainstream society.

What could possibly go wrong?

Whether the project of such a community is legitimate or not depends entirely on what values ​​the group believes in. They have difficulty maintaining unity and often fail due to internal politics: one may become dogmatic and authoritarian, another may be divisive and disharmonious. In addition, when they formally confront the outside world, they are often easily overwhelmed by outside forces.

Individualist-escapers

Such people are usually laissez-faire, anarcho-capitalists, and underground bunker-building billionaires who wish to sever dependence and transcend social obligations. In this category we see people trying to break away from the mainstream of society without necessarily creating a new society that is particularly organized or definable.

What could possibly go wrong?

Only when the original society is no longer worth living in can people have a good reason to escape reality. Escapist projects often fail quietly because they ignore the importance of community and society and end up doing less with twice the result. However, they can also succeed covertly, going unnoticed initially because they do not appear to be representative of the entire group movement, ultimately mitigating the collective oppression of the community in the positive case, or, in the negative case, Weaken the normative cage of society and cut off the cultural constraints that dominate society.

Responsible Experimenters

Over the years, many responsible experimenters - such as pragmatic back-to-nature people, kibbutzim (Israel's) kibbutzim, Tolstoyan farmers, etc. - have successfully demonstrated that new Societies can form at modest scales. The best of them have also succeeded in establishing mutually beneficial and effective interdependent relationships with the outside world. Today, the challenge is to understand this spirit of responsible collaboration and bring it into the digital age. There is reason to be hopeful: because Zuzalu brings together a diverse group of thinkers to explore new forms of society—not just naive escapers, of course. Moreover, in intellectual circles, even professed libertarians have recently been advocating a limited economic model independent of global markets. RadicalxChange is working hard to develop new currency, property and democratic systems to support the success of these movements.

What could possibly go wrong?

Responsible experimentation is always a narrow road, and it is easy to hit the wall in both directions. How to build an outlet in a global monoculture without falling into dogmatism, or into exclusive values, or into the trap of individualistic escape? It's hard to be successful and do well at the same time. I think being responsible requires acknowledging this and prioritizing modestly successful but noble projects over hugely successful but wildly wrong masterpieces (see: Facebook, AfD ).

In this short article, I'll explore the concept of a new community.

First : How does the new community relate to the concept of social progress?

Second point : Is it possible to build new communities intentionally, like bridges and software; or do they just emerge by accident and/or over time? If the former, how to do it? How do they operate efficiently, resiliently, and in responsible relationships with the rest of the world?

Next, I will conclude with a few specific proposals based on my analysis.

social progress

The concept of "social progress" occupies a strange and somewhat marginalized place in intellectual culture. The adjective "social" is like a cue that what we are talking about here is not uniform "progress," that is, scientific, technological, or material progress. In the absence of consensus on what to measure, we don't know what constitutes "social progress," so it's reasonable to be cautious when using the term. While we can always see technological progress (or pornography ) at a glance, we don't necessarily perceive social progress. However, that doesn't mean social progress doesn't exist, it's just that consensus is hard to come by, just like art or religion. But without social progress, all other forms of progress eventually fail or even regress.

Philosopher and practical advocate Daniel. Daniel Schmachtenberger has observed that when asked about the earliest "technology" in history, most people mention the following three: stone tools, fire, and language. These important milestones represent early human mastery of three basic elements: matter, energy and information. But we can perhaps come up with a fourth, most primitive, what the ancient Greeks called " techne " , that is, the narrative ability and wisdom tradition that emerged in the early days of human civilization, and these are of course related to religion and art.

These technologies are critical to the development of human cooperation. Perhaps language alone, without narrative, is capable of expressing certain simple instructions and basic practical descriptions. But the listener and the speaker often need to have a common sense of morality, law, or the sacred in order to be able to understand the true meaning and correctly interpret each other. It is stories and art, and the wisdom traditions and religions they merge into, that create extended social cohesion, shared values, and let us feel more different possibilities and cooperative "we" (Note 1).

I digress, but the main point is simple: drivers of social cohesion, such as culture, governance, ethics, law, shared stories, and shared values, can be considered “technologies.” Just as we manipulate fire, matter, and information, these stories hold our relationship to each other and to the planet. Their state reflects our performance, and culture is as powerful as machinery.

In fact, progress in any given field of technology (i.e., the ability of humans to manipulate matter, energy, or information) must be measured in terms of another technology. For example, we know our stone tools (matter) are "useful" when we strike flint to create fire (energy). When we see the engines running to move heavy stones (matter), we know that the fire that drives them is useful. We know our computers (information) are useful when their predictions help us get more material or energy resources.

If we think of culture, governance, law, values, etc. as technologies, we can use them to assess progress in other areas of technology as well. We desperately need this additional point of reference to help increase our ability to manipulate matter, energy and information.

This approach helps us clarify the problems we face when creating new communities. We should appreciate and support the techniques people practice in finding new communities (that is, more defined and better stories) with the same enthusiasm. If we do not make progress in deepening and expanding the technology of the community, all other technological advancements will lose purpose and direction, and will eventually fall into internal and external contradictions. Put more bluntly, we will harm ourselves and our environment.

In the rest of this article, I'll share some important " patterns " that I think can help us understand whether communities "useful". Countless failed utopias have killed themselves by misunderstanding these models and others. We have a lot to learn from history in this regard.

A "Patten Language" for Connecting Communities

In the 1970s, a group of architects wrote a great book called A Pattern Language. The book describes small features of buildings and cities, such as "transitional spaces in front of doors" or "patterns of window carpentry that at some point cast interesting shadows on corridors". Ideas like these have helped many architects create spaces that are beautiful, warm, and functional.

The concept of a pattern language helps you describe a system that is too complex to be described by any comprehensive theory. All you can do is a few small observations and hopefully someone else will be able to piece it together usefully. In that spirit, let me share some observations about community cohesion and attraction.

1. Associative Obligations and Shared Fate

Communities are not formed entirely by choice. For example, we do not choose our family, or the circumstances of our birth, yet these circumstances make us part of a particular community. These communities often welcome us or consider us members even if we do not take any action or exercise consent. Sometimes these involuntary associations and unsolicited memberships create genuine moral obligations, even when we don't actively ask for them.

Many people have understandable reservations about the notion of these obligations, at least on an abstract level. There are indeed problems with certain obligations that are compulsorily implicated. For example, racists may unilaterally welcome people into a community simply because of their appearance or ancestry. Does that mean these people have some kind of loyalty or other obligation to the racist? Absolutely not. Many other examples of mandatory involvement, although more innocuous than the one above, are incoherent: If someone tells you that there is a society composed entirely of people who share your birthday, and then claims that you are one of them member, does that mean you have any obligation to the group? Again, absolutely nothing. You don't have any meaningful connection to people who happen to share a birthday with you.

But this is not because obligations must always follow some contract-like "offer and acceptance" pattern. A more satisfactory explanation is that some groups, such as "white people" or "people born on December 15th," simply do not form meaningful communities. The stories they organize are basically of low value: logically inconsistent, or morally questionable, or both. Therefore, they cannot provide a basis for an obligation of mandatory involvement.

But many other implicated groups are not entirely disorderly or morally questionable: their stories are somewhat coherent. If we deny the possibility of all obligations to enforce involvement, we deny the existence of many political and social groups.

For example, suppose someone treats you well because you are their cousin, neighbor, co-worker, co-religionist, union member, teammate, or even just because you are human too. To the extent that is relevant, and to the extent that is reasonable, you may be obliged to reciprocate this special treatment, and may even be honored depending on the category into which you have been placed. Your actions can of course greatly affect the deepening or weakening of the relationship, and these actions also have moral consequences. But that connection somehow starts without you signing anything or making any affirmations.

Community ties deepen when people give each other special treatment. When that special treatment is based on a good story, perhaps logically makes sense, and is morally implicated, reciprocating the treatment becomes an integral part of social life. This is not a mechanical contracting process. We don't have complete control over who our community members are, and that's acceptable.

2. Deweyan Publics

John. John Dewey believed that "publics" or political communities were formed in response to common problems. For example, if a factory in a town starts to pollute the environment, in order to jointly manage the pollution, people will come together as a "public" to deal with the situation.

He understood that in modern society, the hyper-complexity brought about by industrialization makes it difficult for political communities to identify themselves. The problems it confronts are often too diffuse or abstract to be easily organized against them. Yet the job of building a democratic society is disseminating enough information and education that the public can identify itself. Therefore, information about public problems must be widely available, and face-to-face interaction on the ground is crucial in organizing a society to combat problems.

3. Secrecy and Trust

Communities often form around "shared secrets", or in other words: "special knowledge". This knowledge can be cultural, linguistic, scientific, religious or anything else. Communities define themselves by using and protecting this knowledge.

A community's particular knowledge may be a secret language that allows its members to communicate effectively and concretely internally. Or it could be a religious teaching, like the sacred poetry that a Druid initiate must spend years memorizing. It could even be mutual blackmail: members of the criminal syndicate are literally held hostage by each other, and any one can destroy the others by revealing what they know.

When a community's special knowledge is exposed externally, or is recorded in some public object (such as a text), this dilutes the community's cohesion or reliance on each other. Simmel gave the example of the Druids being prohibited from writing down sacred poetry because if these sacred songs were recorded in public texts, younger recruits would no longer need to rely on their elders to understand the teachings. teaching, thereby undermining the intimate sociality inherent in the wisdom tradition. Famous anthropologist Ted. Ted Strehlow has been controversial for releasing some Aboriginal songs and materials that should have been protected as cultural secrets. Nowadays, Wikipedia and ChatGPT have made the connection between teachers and students weak: teachers no longer enjoy special exclusive advantages over information, and even lose the ability to transmit information. Therefore, they are less like teachers to students and more like supervisors. .

In the strongest and most intimate of personal relationships, mutual obligations of confidentiality are usually assumed, and agreements are often entered into on the basis of trust without the need for additional guarantees. In public life, by contrast, a duty of confidentiality is rarely assumed and specific guarantees are usually required. The public's demand for transparency actually reflects the public's assumption that those in power are always up to no good: transparency is to break the "secret room" where those in power exchange secrets with each other, and to prevent those in power from forming "small circles" and then making decisions that deviate from the entire group.

To a certain extent, the strength of the information barrier between a community and its surroundings refers to the extent to which the community truly constitutes a cohesive community that is distinct from its surroundings. This pattern can be seen even at the individual level: a person who can be fully figured out what is going on in his or her mind, and who is therefore fully capable of being manipulated, may lack autonomy and responsibility for his or her actions.

This model has important implications for the interplay between community building and cryptographic technologies, including public blockchains, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and other privacy-enhancing technologies, and designated verifier signatures. .

4. Exit Costs

As I said above, connected obligations may sometimes arise unilaterally or involuntarily. But in fact, they can only be fully demonstrated when people help each other for a long time, establish deep friendships, and have significant moral obligations.

Suppose you want to establish a closer relationship with someone you know well. When did you establish a "friendship" with him? A second call back, or a family vacation for a fifth year together? The answer must be somewhere in the middle, but there is no clear line, and every act of kindness only deepens the relationship. As the relationship deepens, people gradually realize the obligations that arise from the relationship. And here's the key: If the "cost" of "giving up" the relationship is higher, people are more likely to swallow those obligations.

As a result, the deepest relationships and strongest communities are often found in adversity. Compared with peacetime, if two villagers have no choice but to work closely together to survive in a famine, they are likely to develop a deep friendship, such as national public opinion becoming the same enemy during a war, etc.

There are similar results in the business environment, where the likelihood of building trust is lower when borders are fully open and capital can flow unhindered. When people are doing business, they have less reason to invest in these sophistication.

Low "exit costs" make it harder for communities to deepen and mature.

5. Mutual Vulnerability

Therefore, it can be said that all the above patterns point to one theme: mutual weakness . Through meaningful relationships, sharing secrets, facing common problems, and bonding, people become vulnerable to each other.

Vulnerability makes social cohesion a double-edged sword. If we try to treat mutual vulnerability as a variable in social organization and "make the most of" or amplify it, we may indeed increase cohesion, but we may also increase vulnerability or risk.

It may be useful to distinguish between different modes of mutual weakness. For example, vulnerabilities can be symmetric or asymmetric; one-to-many, all-to-all, or part-to-part. It might even be circular, eg, A is vulnerable to B, B is vulnerable to C, and C is vulnerable to A.

All of these patterns deserve further study. Mutual weakness seems to play a very important role in group cohesion. For example, a culture that is willing to respect shared norms is likely to develop when everyone clearly understands that any disrespect for the norms by anyone will be catastrophic for everyone. .

Experiment: Planting the seeds of a relationship with unsecured trust

These patterns help explain why advances in information technology weaken communities. Open money and information networks reduce the importance of local organizations, undermine secrecy, reduce mutual dependence, and make it easy to withdraw from the community. This is the phenomenon of atomization that sociologists, including Simmel, have been studying since the Industrial Revolution. The problem has not diminished, but has intensified, and there is no reason to think this trend will stop.

I worry about this, which is why I find new community initiatives interesting and important. They cannot repeat the mistakes of the past; they should, like tech experts, learn from past failures and build new things based on past successes.

The foregoing pattern hints at the directions some “responsible experimenters” might take to improve their community-building skills. In that spirit, here are two specific experiments that I think are legitimate and interesting.

• Unsecured trust networks
  Blockchain promises to expand cooperation by “removing trust.” But is it possible that this is all wrong? Instead we have to ask, are there ways we can design ways to encourage deeper trust and take advantage of it? Let's imagine a society based on trust and financial weakness, roughly as follows.

  • Several people deposit a sum of money into a joint account. Each of them had the ability to personally withdraw and claim the entire amount of money as their own. If someone takes the money, nothing will stop him and no legal action will be taken against him afterwards. However, everyone knew that doing so would be a serious betrayal of trust.

  • This community can jointly manage wealth, such as investing in stocks, real estate, etc., and share the profits. (Even shared non-cash assets can be easily taken away by any individual in the community; for example, any member can legally claim the community's investment as their personal property.)

  • In addition, the community can issue an internal currency that corresponds to the amount of traditional currency or assets that each member contributes to the community.

    • Group members can use this internal currency to conduct quadratic funding (Quadratic Fundings) to decide how to manage and use shared assets.

    • In addition, and more importantly, the internal currency can (1) exchange services with other members of the society (including the exchange of community assets through Partial Common Ownership (PCO), similar to the " multi-currency " (Plural Money) system or (2) exchange it with outsiders for common currency at the expense of an "exit tax" determined by the community. (Non-community members who hold the currency after such an exchange can use it to purchase services , but you cannot use it to vote.)

  • Because the system shows mutual weakness and anyone can easily cheat everyone else, the internal economy is likely to be unexpectedly efficient and cooperative. I doubt that any of the participants would engage in haggling or cheating in day-to-day transactions. If they really wanted to do these things, they could just take away the assets of the entire community. Furthermore, cheating on each other increases the likelihood that they will take away group assets. The surplus value created by the community currency and internal economy will be enhanced by the mutual trust of the community (perhaps even growing super-linearly).

  • The way such a system creates wealth is very similar to the fractional reserve lending used by banks, but it is more worthwhile. After all, bank loans also create new money through trust or "credit," but they are independent transactions that rely on the bank's guarantee. However, the community does not need to rely on banks, but can choose to issue additional community currency based on the assets they share, while keeping these assets beneficial investment. The community can therefore create new wealth, and its value depends on the level of trust, respect and cooperation within the community. Communities that take their obligations seriously and contribute to their internal economy will see the value of their special currency redeemable for more fiat currency.

  • The size of these communities can be increased gradually and carefully. They may start with a few people who are familiar with each other, and then cautiously admit new members one by one. In addition, it may be possible to set a "cap" on how much each member can "steal" the shared funds, thus providing another way to expand the scale. For example, each member may be allowed to take away 2 times, 5 times or 10 times what they invested, but no more. This allows for larger groups to be built without everyone having to place undue trust in the weakest link. This way larger groups can "deepen" by carefully increasing the amount members are able to "steal", reflecting deeper rather than broader trust.

This leaves many questions. Communities built in this way do not automatically exhibit all of the relevant patterns I described above. For this community to thrive, it can't just rely on one another's financial weakness, but it also needs to build a common foundation culturally. There are also some important issues, such as how to deal with "runs on the treasury" (runs on the treasury), which occur from time to time in any financial system. However, this conscious interweaving of interests may open up new possibilities for deepening community and increasing social and financial security.

Another thing that is also very interesting is that we would generally assume that rich people are less willing than poor people to trust each other without guarantees. But I suspect that the real reason rich people can't trust each other is because they have too much wealth to be vulnerable to each other. Thus, these systems may hold promise for some kind of balance among communities, as poorer communities are better able to exploit each other's vulnerabilities than richer ones.

Another slightly less certain experimental idea. (I guess something similar already exists, please help me understand more):

• Circular Formal Authority Structures : This model has not been fully explored, but it may help to re-establish the paradigm in the cultural context of the already worn-out informal norms.

  • Suppose there is an authority structure of the form "A→B→C→A". This is related to the concept of "checks and balances", but more specifically: what we are talking about here is not blanket influence or multi-party veto, but a system in which each actor can be rewarded or condemned by the other in a loop. Imagine a team of three members sitting around a table doing a job together, but each member decides the salary of the person to their left.

  • It's a bit of a "house of cards" in that the effectiveness of the circular authority structure clearly depends on informal norms among members. Thus, informal norms may have a very good chance of gaining power. All actors in the system may work together to develop sound norms and take them seriously.

  • This is interesting to me because informal norms usually only have real power in institutions with a deep shared history or strong authority. Yet informal norms are so important that many institutions in a democratic society seem to ignore them. That's why it seems like an interesting way to experiment with building circular authority structures in the absence of (a) or (b).

in conclusion

Building new communities is difficult. And it is even more difficult to build new communities in a way that is responsible, honest and productive to the participants and society at large.

But I don’t think there’s a way around these things. Compared to our technologies for manipulating matter, energy, and information, our technologies for building social cohesion are woefully behind. So either we destroy machines (unlikely), or machines will destroy society (probably will), or we need to be more conscious about making society stronger.

I came up with some ideas that I thought were worth experimenting with. If you agree, please contact me, let's work together to practice.

Many thanks to Paula Berman, Jack Henderson, Angela Corpus, Alex Randaccio, and Christopher Kulendran Thomas for their suggestions, discussions, and ideas for contributing to this article.

annotation

1. If these three things correspond to the three classical elements - earth, fire and air - what is the fourth element? Please let me imagine it as "water". It is a generative metaphor: water brings coherence and regeneration, and sustains life. It protects the earth, which connects and supports our bodies and for which we are responsible, and which protects us from the sun. It changes its phase to buffer excess energy. Intuitively, water would spontaneously form ordered structures as energy increases, but in fact the opposite is true. When water vapor cools, it first condenses into liquid and then crystallizes into ice. This way the water is always ready to perform its protective role. Water keeps the other elements in harmony.