Ep 2: Pathways to Commons-Based Sovereignty
Guests: Douglas Rushkoff & Jordan Hall Series: Network Nations on GreenPill Podcast Listen: Spotify
Exploring the power of narratives and memes in shaping political and digital realities and how they can unlock bottom-up coordination for Network Nations.
Transcript
[00:00] Welcome to the Network Nations mini-series on the Greenpearl podcast. I’m Felix Beer and together with Primavera de Filippi, I’ll be your co-host for the coming episodes. Across the world, new kinds of civic communities are taking shape. Communities that use decentralized technologies such as blockchain and peer-to-peer networks to govern themselves, manage shared resources, and act together across geographic borders. We call them network nations.
[00:24] And in this series, we want to explore the idea of network nations as a new political design space for civil society in the network age. Our goal is to chart an alternative path from the network state, 1 where technology serves civil society, not the other way around. Instead of reproducing today’s power imbalances in network societies, we are asking, What if network societies were built from the bottom up
[00:47] as shared commons rather than from the top down as startup ventures? What if they treated members as co-creators rather than customers? What if they practiced cooperation and mutual care rather than competition and extraction? And what if network societies cultivated a sense of sovereignty that is grounded in the idea of a collective good for the many rather than a private asset owned by
[01:09] the few? Each episode brings together thinkers, builders and organizers who are exploring this new frontier of community self-governance. They will help us to imagine how civil society can reclaim political agency in the age of networks and to bring shape to this idea of network nations. To learn more you can visit our website networknations.network where you’ll find our manifesto, community resources and opportunities to get involved with our growing network.
[01:35] Today we are joined by Douglas Rushkoff and Jordan Hall to explore how narratives shape the politics of the Internet. We will be tracing the interplay between digital culture, social media and technopolitics and discuss how memes can help us to imagine network nations, but also how they can help us to see them in the real world. Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author and host of the podcast Team Human.
[01:56] He was 1 of the first people to identify the viral logics of the digital culture in his seminal book from the 1990s actually, Media Virus. So he was on this topic long before social media became even a thing. Jordan Hall is a serial entrepreneur and a philosopher, also a frequent guest of this Greenpill podcast series. And he has more than 3 decades of experience when it comes
[02:16] to designing and thinking about coordination systems. He’s predominantly currently occupied with the question of how to move beyond the polycrisis. And we’re very much looking forward to having this conversation with these 2 thinkers. And we will be diving into questions of how narratives and memetics shape our network reality and can help us bring alive the idea of network nations. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the conversation.
[02:45] So welcome Jordan and Douglas to our show on Network Nations. We are very happy to have you today to talk about the power of narratives and more specifically how memes can help us shape our network political futures. We want to start with a general observation that Primavera and I have, and that’s that we are basically living through a sort of Cambrian explosion, if you will, of
[03:07] governance, innovation and experimentation. So there’s a lot of projects going on at the moment, the network state, sea-stating, sea-oil dictatorships, but also more progressive versions like Guy Regional Movement, Mutualist and SolarPunks, who are basically developing new narratives around how we can organize ourselves beyond the limits of the nation state. And this is like an emerging landscape, I guess, of like new kind of technopolitics. And we would like to explore this landscape
[03:34] together with you today, and then also discuss what the role of network nations can be as like a powerful meme to shape kind of like the mind space in this direction. So I would love to start with picking your minds on the state of affairs, basically. What are the main kind of narratives that you see emerging and the movements? What are the big memes in the space of technopolitics that are currently
[04:01] capturing our imagination? And Jordan, I would like to pass the ball to you to start. You have to make that move. So maybe I’d lead with the most notable thing that I’m seeing right now is the collapse of the major narrative that defined, certainly the West, and I would say largely the world, post-war. So the period from the end of World War I through to the shortly after
[04:31] the end of World War II was a period of of kind of a narrative reboot or narrative establishing. And we’ve been living in the world of that narrative. So just call it the post-war narrative since then. And that narrative is now beginning to break apart. And by the way, morally or in terms of the orienting values that orient people’s choices, as well as structurally in terms of the institutional forms that
[04:59] are the embodiment of that narrative in procedures. And so both sides of the equation are beginning to break apart, and that therefore begins to move us into a space where this Cambrian explosion is both afforded and 1 might, in fact, ultimately also then necessary, because we can’t live together in groups without some kind of narrative to help us orient our choices collectively. Cool. Douglas, I saw that you gave a talk recently,
[05:30] which was called the weirding of the internet or the weirding of the digital. And indeed, I think a lot of the narratives which are floating around can like seem pretty weird. Like they are making pretty big kind of, announcing pretty big changes or want to bring about pretty big changes. A lot of them are somewhat worrying, at least from my perspective, like niche ideas, like a dictatorship, a CEO dictatorship, all
[05:56] of a sudden capturing a lot of mind space. And I just wonder, like, what is your perspective on this? Like, why are we seeing this proliferation of kind of these niche ideas all of a sudden, like bursting into public discourse? Well, it’s interesting. I mean, I felt I was around for what felt like the first burst of these in the early 1990s with the cypherpunk movement and people comparing
[06:26] the internet to the Gaia hypothesis. But that felt like You know, there was, but that felt like a positive, creative, you know, potentiated imaginary of new worlds. You know, it was like a, almost a ravers utopian dream of how else could human beings organize? Could the love that’s informing this 5, 000-person dance festival inform a new way for government or societies to self-organize. And that gave way to this whatever
[07:09] libertarianism thing we’ve lived through for the last 20 or 30 years. And I think, and I agree with Jordan here, it got to the place where our leadership secretly and our populations more publicly no longer believe in the solidity or future or functionality of government, economics, planetary management as we know it. And what we’re witnessing is their strategy is, and I understand it, Get as rich
[07:46] as you fucking can before the collapse, because you’ll be in a better position, at least if you have money and power, something money and technology. The hundred people that are the wealthiest hundred people in the world, especially if they’ve managed to engineer some kind of a police state military way of controlling populations, should survive. And They no longer believe that there is a way for sort of everybody
[08:19] to make it through. So if everybody’s not going to make it through, then I would rather way more people die and get to be 1 of the few who make it through than be in the same boat with everybody else. And in the face of that, I feel like there’s a lot of us, both smart people and regular people, turned on people and normal civilians who are saying, well,
[08:47] if we’re on our own, then what do we do? So some move into the prepper fantasy, which is again a fantasy of a kind of governance, right? How do we govern after as, you know, as preppers with our little guns and things in some anarchist state. But it’s led to a new explosion, as you’re saying, a new Cambrian explosion of ideas, more out of necessity.
[09:14] What the heck are we going to do here? How do we organize? And most of us, people like me, are, even though I was all internetty and LSDish and have big brain, galaxy brain ideas, the best I can do currently is conceive of lots of local, bottom-up, simple kibbutz-like villages that are somehow working together. And I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around a larger, you know, the structure of
[09:46] that federation. And what I’m hoping to be able to do here is to, and through this memes conversation even, to learn how to better think about the way all these things can work together, even as well as, you know, the Native American tribes did after the collapse of their pyramidal civilization. How do we do this? And how does even a functional technological network help us do this?
[10:15] So I’m excited to learn that. Yeah, just maybe briefly follow up on this. Like we had this kind of weird transition, like if we think back maybe like 15 years or something to occupy Wall Street, the message was the future is cancelled. And now kind of the reality we’re facing is everything seems possible, right? Like nothing seems off the grid to discuss in a way when we talk about
[10:35] governance all of a sudden. But although a lot of this imagination is like fueled, as you say, by dissatisfaction, distrust in the traditional institutions, like fear of this emerging poli crisis, like everything, you know, like all these old institutions don’t seem to be fit for the tasks that are emerging now. There is mainly libertarian and reactionary ideas which are able to channel this in a way. And I just wonder why this
[11:00] is. So why do we see so little progressive memes that are emerging and that are also capturing more mind space? Smavira, do you want to come in? Yeah, I, before, before that question, because that’s the next question, I think you said something very interesting, Douglas, which is like, in fact, like the early internet narratives were quite libertarian as well. Because, you know, like the cyberpunks were all about libertarianism, the
[11:26] cyberpunks too, etc. So it feels like there is, there is also many different flavors in the, in the libertarianism, where the internet type of libertarian approach somehow felt like empowering and felt like positive, constructive. Whereas today, which is maybe the internet was even more libertarian than many of the things today. It feels different, right? It doesn’t have this same, I don’t know, it feels negative or for some reason.
[11:59] And it’s a question of, for both of you, it’s like, can, can you, can you name what is it, What is it that actually distinguish the flavor of libertarianism that the Internet had and the current 1 that we’re experiencing with those like network states, c-studying type of things? Yeah, I mean, we didn’t know most of us kids didn’t know what we were doing was libertarianism. You know, it came from John Barlow,
[12:26] kind of a Grateful Dead lyricist, and it just sounded like getting government surveillance and regulation away from us being able to develop this thing. So what we experienced was the FBI storming into teenagers’ houses and arresting them for hacking into things just not to break, but just to explore. It was tipper gore and a computer decency act trying to tell everyone that the
[12:56] internet was about child porn and going to restrict our content. So it felt like government get away from this thing. And we, so we, the people can be free. We didn’t know that getting rid of government meant creating free rein for corporations. It just, it, we didn’t get that they sort of balance each other out in a system like bacteria and fungus.
[13:20] So the libertarian side just felt like raver freedom to us. We didn’t really know. We didn’t know from libertarianism. We didn’t read Richard Barbrook and all that, you know, downer stuff about, you know, what markets and corporations would do. It felt like the Internet was it was free of corporations at that point. They weren’t allowed to come on. You had to sign a document saying you promised
[13:45] to use this for research. So we couldn’t imagine commercial activity coming on this thing. So it seemed like the Internet was going to be free of all that. The shopping mall was in the real world. The Internet was for us to talk about Gundam, you know, And which seemed like it was non-commercial to us at the time anyway. The difference now is that the Libertarians won.
[14:06] They took over the whole thing. They created these, you know, the feudalist private platforms in the place of Usenet and Fidonet. And I mean, Fidonet was a networked thing. It was a totally bottom up phenomenon where people use their own computers as the Internet. Your friend’s house, your friend’s RadioShack computer was the network server for your neighborhood. It wasn’t owned by anybody. So we couldn’t imagine what happened.
[14:38] And now that those libertarians have, well, we know their visions of private nations or private states, those of us who are expressing that original same psychedelic fractal urge are, I think, moving towards something much more progressive, bottom up, and narco-syndicalist or whatever it would be. So in some way, like if I try to, if I try to nail it down, it’s like, it feels like the early internet type of libertarianism was
[15:13] about claiming freedom away from state control. And it feels today, it feels today that actually now the now the corporate is the is the 1 that is in control. And so if you want to be libertarian, you kind of need to escape from the corporate control just as much as escaping from the state control. Yeah. You’d move towards an Adam Smith like, I guess, you know, Adam Smith was
[15:40] a moral philosopher, though he’s been adopted by the libertarians and the economist as their figurehead. That’s no better than Wired adapting Marshall McLuhan as their figurehead. Adam Smith was actually arguing for the power of local business against these abstract international corporations. But yeah, but I’m not a libertarian. I wouldn’t want to speak for them. But we can talk about the sort of the Internet counterculture urge and how easily
[16:10] I think they were co-opted by libertarian memes because we didn’t know what they meant. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think it’s very important because I think we are all very aligned with the early internet type of libertarianism, if we want to call it like that. And yet we’re not aligned with the current libertarianism. And so we need to understand where we locate our own narrative because I think
[16:38] our whole narrative is close to the early internet narrative, but it’s also very different from the libertarian narrative. Okay. That’s interesting. It feels like I want to do a recapitulation to make sure we’re constantly reifying the most kind of relevant stuff. Douglas and I have not even spoken, I think, at all, really, but certainly not recently. And yet we’re remarkably coordinated on the big picture he just articulated.
[17:02] So when I look out at the universe of narratives that are out there, there’s sort of 2 bottleneck narratives that seem to dominate those who have access to the capacity to think they can navigate the bottleneck. So you’ve got the resource scarcity bottleneck, and then you’ve got the power scarcity bottleneck. So some people are saying there’s going to be some sort of collapse of resource or some collapse of the ability to
[17:26] have everybody decide that they want to play nicely because they can get more stuff by playing nicely. And so there’s a race to grab the high watermarks or the most secure locations to control those resources. And they have power bottleneckers. Those are mostly in the singularity side. So they’re looking at anything as this kind of a narrowing frontier of those who are in positions of leadership of power and
[17:47] the gap between number 1 and number 2 gets larger and larger. And so you run into a place where there’s something like a singleton or an intrinsic oligarchy. These 2 groups are, in fact, dispositionally different because they have different lineages, but roughly end up being coordinated because they’re seeing something like a bottleneck. And when I look at that, the alternative that I see looks a lot like
[18:11] some kind of, or how do you say, coordinated federation of small groups. What was the phrase you used? Did you use indigenous tribes? You know, local, very, very local groups. And the challenge then is how does that coordinate in such a fashion that it’s able to produce a capacity to hold itself in resistance to the previous 2. And we should say this, there’s other narratives that
[18:37] are out there, of course, there’s sort of the re-establishing of pre-liberal structures that have Wang lineage. And so the imperial China is a real thing, which is not strictly 1 of the previous 2, although it can be 1 of the 2 bottlenecks. The global caliphate is an older narrative that didn’t get erased. And so it’s coming back. All right. So you’ve got sort of older legacy narratives
[19:04] that are reestablishing themselves as the dominant master narrative is breaking apart. And then you have emergent narratives of which there’s only a handful, like again, the bottlenecking and this weird 1 that we’re talking about. So then when we talk about the weird 1 we’re talking about, I think Douglas, I maybe, well, how old are you? I’m 54 today. I’m now, I’m like 10 years older this, this in the
[19:27] next month or so. Okay. So, So in terms of the cyberpunk, cypherpunk, like he was the high school kid when I was the early middle school kid. Like he was the senior when I was a sixth grader and or whatever, fourth, fifth, fourth, fifth grader. And So we have a slightly different view, but I was immersed up to my eyeballs in that world too. And I was, you know, hanging
[19:52] out on the hacker boards and figuring out how to download wares and whatnot and learning how to. And so the ethos, right, And I want to say there’s something like an aesthetic ethics sensibility, which is normative about participation that is felt and absorbed by relationship that precedes something like narrative, right? Narrative comes later. We can, by the way, use the logic, the language of scenius helps here, and
[20:20] this is how it always happens. And there was a scene, right? The cyberpunk, cypherpunk scene. And you participated in that scene by virtue of being able to grasp it and participate in it. And even like fun little side quests like, how do you get a list of telephone numbers for your modem to dial up into? Things like that. And getting each of these things meant sharing them as well.
[20:42] By definition. It was 1 in the same. So it’s so hard to call that libertarian because Bill, how could you be a citizen of the shareware universe and a libertarian at the same time? So that’s part of why we didn’t understand even those memes. The notion of libertarian implies a whole commitment to a whole bunch of characteristics. I did not, I have never actually read Enron, never.
[21:07] So I certainly didn’t when I was 12. But I was really captured by the punk rock ethos, right? So there was a sense of autonomy. But the key thing here I would like to say is that there was a sense of a territory. There was a space. It was the virtual space. The virtual space was quite distinct from the physical space in which we lived and
[21:26] in which we perceived a form of constraint that was very difficult to resist. You should resist it, right? School was bullshit, so resist school. For the most part, you know, government was bullshit, so you resist that. But you resist it in kind of like the Hakeem Bey way, right? You found little cracks, you found warehouses that nobody was at, and you put together
[21:46] your rave and you disappeared in the cracks, right? But in the virtual, nobody else was there, man. And nobody had any idea how to play with it. And the guys who were there were grownups. They were kind of like you and they were ready, willing to play. And they’re actually really interested in, and this is where we’re gonna start talking about the nation sensibility. They were really interested in an
[22:09] actual initiation. And I mean this actually very much in the indigenous sensibility. Like you’re being invited into a tribe and a tribe of people who are held together because of a like mind, a shared sense of values, a shared aesthetic, a shared orientation. And it’s very broad. Like you don’t have to petition, you don’t have to follow this set of rules. You don’t have to believe this set of sort
[22:29] of doctrinal characteristics to participate. But you do have to learn how to play properly together, that kind of a thing. You notice the difference? And so, where I think we’re noticing, that’s kind of fun, I actually quite like this, that we’re, okay guys, we came in And I actually stepped through the portal of being an entrepreneur. I think largely because Douglas was much more in a kind
[22:55] of human relationality, whereas I was more playing strategy games. So when I looked at the space and the opportunity, I was like, I want to create space for my people to participate. And so, all right, what how will I do that? Took a took a look at it as a game board. Looks like this sort of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates thing, I can play that role.
[23:14] Okay, I can do that kind of thing. And that allows me to create space. Like I can force the world to shift in a way that is in accordance with the values that I ascribed to. And work specifically, right, MP3 and DIVX, specifically in making this kind of conversation physically possible by modulating the territory. But I can definitely look back over the past 25, 30 years and say, man,
[23:36] we did not deliver on what it is we wanted to do. And now we’re at at the 11th hour, 59 minutes. There’s not a whole lot of time left to not pull it off. So what I’m noticing is actually a really interesting sense of urgency of saying, hey, folks who are in our generation, and we are actually just at the, you know,
[23:58] in the center of a generation, Douglas and I, are looking and saying, hey, we’ve got a view of a long arc, and we see that the door is closing on the highest possibilities. We’d like to figure out how to actually make that space for the values that we can’t help, but still ultimately perceive as being good. How do we do that? So now we’re having this conversation ends up being some
[24:20] sense very practical. How do we actually establish what we think we ought to be doing in this context of what you’re calling network nation as a an extension of the ethos of that earlier period that is just just about to exit shared memory. So 1 thing that you say that I think is very interesting is like the question of autonomy, which is very, is really strong in the early Internet movement.
[24:46] And in fact, it’s not that strong at all in those new libertarian things. They are not talking about autonomy anymore. They are talking about this connection from a particular existing state entity. They are not talking about autonomy of the individual and they are actually more like creating a new system of control because they think that the corporation is a better control system than the state, but it’s not about autonomy anymore.
[25:12] So perhaps it’s even like, is it even, is it, is it actually as libertarian as the early Internet. The other thing I think is that while the Internet was about autonomy, it was also about interconnection and interdependence. And the autonomy emerged because people collaborate and because everything is internetworked. And therefore we can be more autonomous, but we can be more autonomous together. And I think this is also something that is very
[25:40] different from today’s libertarian narratives, where the notion of autonomy is very little and also the notion of togetherness is very little and it’s more like, let’s take what seems to work, which is the startup modality. Let’s play the corporation game at every level for governments, but not leveraging the people. It’s kind of like autonomy versus capacity, like how do we augment the capacity of people through this interconnection, because alone, you can
[26:11] be autonomous, but you’re not very powerful. And together, we can be more autonomous, because we have more capacity through these interconnectedness. And I think this is at least where we, through the network national narrative, connect very closely to the ethos of the early Internet. But also we’re not about, we don’t name autonomy as being the main thing, we actually name like interdependence and interconnection and entanglement, but with the ultimate goal of
[26:44] making the people more powerful and empowered through those technologies or through those new institutional arrangements. Yeah. I mean, in the early internet era, the way we talked about these issues and the way we talked about the illusion of compromise between individuality and group cohesion was to use natural metaphors. And I know there’s problems with them because, you know, as they say, the Marxists use facts and fascists use metaphors, but they worked.
[27:18] So we had the rhizomatic metaphor, which really helped us and helped us argue for something different, for another way of understanding collection. We had the fractal and the beauty of the fractal was the self-similarity. We had, and we still do, mycelial networks are great for people to understand, oh, there are these little separate mushrooms all over the place, but they’re actually connected by a global invisible network of strands that keep it
[27:51] all together and that help us metabolize all of each other’s stuff and solve problems. And along with that was chaos math, fractal math, which had this concept of remote high leverage points. And everybody told that same, you know, Loren’s metaphor about the butterfly flapping its wings in China. But the thing that was powerful to me about it was that, oh, so if you have this network fractal thing, then huge system-wide changes
[28:21] can come from anywhere. So it’s not that every individual is super powerful all the time, but any individual can express what the network needs at any moment. So the network can hear each individual. And it seemed to me, oh, this is this more sort of natural state of being. So we were going to kind of take down the top-down William Randolph Hearst, Rupert Murdoch style of technological communications and replace
[28:50] it with this bottom up internet-y, mycelial fractal organization that we’re, and this was our mistake, where the self-organization would just self-organize, right? We felt we go in it with our hearts in the right places. And as Jordan said, doing the right things, when you get the good game, you go to the back. I mean, this is very American. You go to the back of the bus with
[29:20] your box of 5 and a quarter inch floppies and you trade them with the other kids. There’s no point in having the game. Everyone gets the game and then the game is more fun. So it seemed that we would, through a new way of being, a new set of behaviors, would engender the organization we were talking about. We wouldn’t have to do, it’s very lazy, We wouldn’t have to do any political
[29:46] activity. It just would happen somehow spontaneously. It’s super exciting to hear these reflections. And if we assume that there is still this kind of progressive capacity, which is kind of latent in internet technologies, right, To connect us, to help us coordinate better, to collaborate and help civic communities around the globe maybe to become political agents as it was originally intended, right? By the early internet generations.
[30:15] If this is a potential which is still latent to some extent, how can we leverage this? This is the key question I guess we’re trying to address with Networked Nations. And on the 1 hand side, this is of course a question of how to build sovereign infrastructures and all of this and the web-free community is doing a whole lot to help in this direction. But on another level, it’s about creating a
[30:35] shared narrative, which helps to mobilize also people beyond the tech communities to kind of drive this vision, right, of like new internet enabled forms of organization, I would say. And I think why we are choosing the Network Nation frame for this narrative is because we believe beyond the tech stack, we need like a shared sense of belonging and identity, which is driving this. And That’s why the nation might be an interesting
[31:02] concept to work with, because if we try to isolate it from the nation state, right, which has like a legacy and some problems, of course, the nation kind of signals that there is like a community of people who are bound by a strong sense of kinship. And this is like an aspirational ideal to which we potentially can work towards if we build the right vehicles. So that’s, I guess, like a bit
[31:24] all rational. I wonder like how this resonates with you and where you see problems or potentials with this. So there were 2 big failures that happened in the early internet. I’m here thinking kind of the transition between what became known as 1 and 2. 1 failure was the weakness of the kinship bonds. So we ended up being too willing to allow simple lightweight affinity to be the
[31:54] bonds. Therefore, this tunnels us through to the next major error. So kinship needs to be stronger than affinity. You’re not gonna be able to do the kinds of things that are necessary if all you have is like 2 or 3 opinions that you share. That’s not enough. If we’re sort of all fans of Daft Punk, that’ll that’ll allow us to coordinate a very narrow band of function and
[32:24] and we’ll probably break apart like if if a few of us have terminal cancer, the Daft Punk community is not going to unless those 2 happen to be the half-punctured artists themselves, organize taking care of them. And so the notion of kinship requires both richer and stronger bonds, which, by the way, implies some kind of membrane, the word I’ve been using is initiation, some kind of procedure and process whereby people are
[32:54] brought into those relationships with enough density and continuity that they hold. And by the way, they prove You know that you’re really in a strong relationship when shit hits the fan and the relationship shows up. And these kinds of things have been done in other contexts. So we can we can map kind of the religious context in a moment if
[33:14] we’d like. So what happened is since we allowed ourselves to organize around affinity, which is lightweight and easy and unfortunately is also can be large, we then made ourselves available to then be to be organized by the structures that were maximally able to be built on top of that and to extract value from that. Right, so we shifted into the corporate environment. So I’m very much seeing Facebook or
[33:40] MySpace and then Facebook with these environments were like, hey, if I can have the most people with the minimum viable amount of affinity to move them through the lightest weight possible membrane into a world that I control, then I can get access to their attention. I can start boiling the frog and holding them there. So I’m not expecting them to do a whole lot.
[34:02] And therefore what ended up happening is we forked, the timeline forked. We forked into the timeline that we’ve been living for the past 25 years where all of the energy in the system for constructing the kinds of, how do you say, ordering, enculturating, orienting structures have been captured by a very narrow set of possibilities and all the human attention has been, what do you call it, distracted by a
[34:31] lot of small things. And so what ends up happening, for example, is the, in fact, I bet we can even find the time when this happened, but the horrible degeneracy of the flag icon. How am I going to respond to an event that I don’t like while I’m going to put up a flag or a little thing next to my P my identity that says that I stand with whoever is the
[34:54] thing at the moment, which report the point is that’s the that’s the channel that that that emotion could be pushed through on the platform as it currently exists, which is awesome because it allows the current platform to allow everybody to focus a little bit of energy, but it doesn’t do anything. So then the next piece, I’ll use metaphors, I guess I’m a fascist, super saturated solution. This is a very important thing
[35:19] for those who are still hanging on to keep in mind. I guess I had this idea of like the super saturated solution. I’ve got the kind of the visual of the jar and it looks like a liquid, but if I hit it, it suddenly turns into a crystal. We’re in a super saturated solution. We’re in an environment where the things that need
[35:36] to happen to establish a movement tremendously through to a much higher level of capacity are just right over there. We just have to hit it properly. We have to hit this global network with the right angle, with the right autocatalytic protocol, so that the right small bit changes and that small bit then potentiates the next bit changing and the next bit potentiates the next bit.
[36:01] We go through a series of what are called trophic cascades and we find ourselves on the other side of something and this can happen by the way like tomorrow if we got it done right because the potential is extremely bound up. I think we are we are very aligned on like we we feel that there is this thing like I think the reason that people buy those solutions, most people
[36:22] that I think are like pro-network state and pro-whatever weird narrative is popping up, I don’t think they are actually, I think they are just really dissatisfied of the current state of affair. And in some way, people are just hungry of hearing something that is kind of like radically different. And whatever is radically different from the present is salient. So I think our challenge of course is how do we create just as
[36:53] much of a salient narrative that can actually help the people that currently have been providing allegiance to those techno-libertarian type of corporate narratives to also see there is other radical possibilities that are just as salient and interesting. I was at this conference last week and then I was kind of discussing this and then someone said something that really disturbed me but made me out of thinking. And I was asking like, what’s
[37:28] the narrative? Why are there no movements, like actual movements around the commons. There is like maybe the digital commons, but you don’t really have like those powerful movement and those powerful leaders that are bringing the movement forward. And the answer that this person said was that the Commons, they actually, the narrative of the Commons is such as to attract people that don’t want to be the
[37:54] leader. And it’s attracting those people that just constantly question and constantly like, you know, don’t do things, don’t don’t actually move forwards and don’t have the drive of actually I’m going to be the leader of this movement, follow me, because it’s very antithetic to the commons. So I think there is also this interesting thing, because when we look at those movement leaders that are actually taking on, those people are not afraid
[38:21] of positioning themselves as leaders and getting followers to follow them. But if you want to eat your own dog food, and if your movement is about emancipation of individuals and not actually taking the power position in order to influence people to follow you, it becomes really hard to be the leader of that movement. So I’m very curious, like, what’s your take on that?
[38:47] Let me see if I can layer in a couple of pieces. In order to navigate the complexity of the environment we find ourselves in, I think quite often we’re going to have to actually go relatively deep. So I hope that’s not going to annoy people who are watching. So for example, for the most part, we tend to import the basic ontology that
[39:07] was developed at the period of the Enlightenment in order to think about the world. All right. So for example, we tend to assume oftentimes as a presupposition, we don’t even think about the notion of the liberal individual as an ontological primitive. And therefore, we end up being constrained in our degrees of freedom because we’re actually importing a bunch of stuff that is both false and not helpful.
[39:32] For example, just now, there is an assumption if you’re operating with the liberal individual as your ontological primitive, that what you do is ultimately, let’s say arbitrary or constrained by things like preference or strategy, mostly objective in nature. So we’re like, hey, I want to be a person who’s protecting the commons because I think that’s an important thing to do. And we assume that basically everybody’s effectively
[39:57] neutral and you can kind of load responsibility on people on the basis of either what is the most efficient resource allocation or people’s preferences. But if I harken back to a ontology that predates that, right, so I’m doing a recovery process, and I got this by the way by talking almost entirely to indigenous groups, most specifically in this case the Polynesians. That’s actually not how their ontology
[40:23] works at all. The way their ontology works is every distinct individual human, every human, every person actually has a proper responsibility in the world that is theirs, specifically, that they are uniquely prepared to take. This would be called their kuleana in the Polynesian. And by the way, you would have an appropriate amount of power or capacity in the abstract sense, not in the sense of practical, to properly steward that.
[40:46] And the reason why I bring this up is, if you look horizontally at a variety of different kinds of non-post-enlightenment, non-Western enlightenment ontologies, you discover that the commons is in fact properly stewarded by somebody who looks like what we would now call a king. Somebody who has a wholeness of responsibility. And by the way, what I have to do here is I now have to say, by the way, we’re living downstream
[41:13] of a very long history of anti-king propaganda, which leads us to the weirdly denatured frame of somebody like Yarvin, which I will actively rebuke as being both foolish and wrong. When he has this idea of promoting the monarch and then saying that like the CEO of Walmart is a monarch, which is exactly perfectly wrong. A proper monarch, right, which is to say a proper chief, a proper person who
[41:40] is holding a responsibility, has precisely the opposite sensibility as a CEO, which is to say that they take as their, when I say they take as their responsibility, they take as part of the essence of who they are. Their identity is in fact a wholeness, some kind of commons that they must actually steward up to and including their death. And so they, they’re not only able to,
[42:05] but they can’t otherwise then surrender or sacrifice themselves into the protection of the whole, the commons that is theirs to protect. And that’s not at all what, what the technocrat, what would you call it, singleton or technocrat center point looks like or behaves like. So part of the reason why we’ve run into the problem of the commons is that we’re endeavoring to navigate commons using post-enlightenment ontologies and epistemologies.
[42:33] And those are intrinsically anti-commons in their nature. And so of course, they’re not going to either be strong enough or trustworthy enough to do it. Yeah, I was going to say enlightenment. And I know you know more about the Enlightenment than I do. I specialize in late medievalism as this sort of golden age, a different way of understanding the relationship of the individual to where they live and
[42:56] how they work. And it seemed to me that your original question had something to do with sort of the reluctance of people to take on leadership roles in this. And I do think it does have something to do with the way that the Enlightenment defined the individual and sort of personal freedom and responsibility and all. And we, it was something I really started to think about during Occupy when people
[43:27] were criticizing Occupy that there were no leaders. Oh, there’s no leaders. And I kept saying, what? Everyone’s a leader. It’s filled with leaders. You can’t recognize it because you’re looking for, you know, Moses rather than what does what does it look like when everyone is taking taking on some kind of a leadership role. And I feel like, again, going back to a network nation, there is,
[43:53] I would say, there’s an enhancement of what individuality truly is in a commons, in a collective commons network structure that you don’t get. We were raised with this notion of the individual as a part, as somehow manifesting one’s individuality requires their separateness or being pedestal. I’ve been thinking so much about indigenous understandings of this versus Western ones. I went to see the new Rockefeller wing at the met in New York and
[44:31] looked at all of the South American, African, and, you know, and island art and in the next wings, you could see the Greco-Roman stuff. And the Greco-Roman stuff were these perfect, they were statues made with absolute verisimilitude of utterly unattainable body types. You know, they looked perfectly real, but were fictional and pedestaled and up. And I was like, well, if you’re starting to think of leadership as
[45:01] that, I don’t want to be a leader, I can’t be that, rather than thinking of leadership in a more, almost a campesino context, or leadership in the Zapatista movement, again, which was something that was, Zapatistas were celebrated on the early internet, because they seemed to be the kind of movement that we could build. Again, along with the commons, which was exactly pre-Enlightenment, the commons.
[45:32] It was pre-printing press. It was pre-Protestant Reformation. It’s when people had the ability to understand home not as the house they lived in, but the town they were from. Yeah, maybe building a little bit on what you just said, and especially what Jordan was riffing on, I think 1 thing we are trying to understand is like what kind of values you want to embed in our narrative, and is this new narrative
[45:59] about new network forms of coordination only a set of policy propositions, like we know it from the political realm, or are we trying to design a new environment for coordination as such, right? You could describe, for instance, the nation state also as a coordination technology, which kind of affords a specific set of, you know, politics, like autocratic nations that, through democratic nations, that estates progressive to conservative politics.
[46:26] And in this way, I think we’re- But then, exactly. Right. But when you go there, And that’s the place that I was I was going to go. I didn’t want to be critical. I mean, because I’m the memes guy. Right. I wrote the book Media Virus. I was all in memes. Believe me, they were my my thing. But I’m thinking it’s so much more that
[46:43] that narrative is communicated almost more like an Alan Capro happening. It’s it’s It’s communicated almost more like a video game. Through the, what are the rules through which we engage? Or a reality TV show. Which has no written story, but how do we set things up so that the story that we want to see played out happens.
[47:04] And that’s, I mean, in some ways it’s beyond my pay grade, but that’s what I’m hoping. And I, what I do know is if you set it up like they’re set up on Twitter X, You don’t get the story that we want. Right? I have a very challenging question following this, which is, so if the meme is about tapping into a particular type of minds that are ready to accept this
[47:35] meme. I think like if we go back to like the early internet, because I think it’s actually a very, a very illustrative example, The reason that the early internet was cool, it was because the type of people that will join the early internet were cool, right? It takes a particular mindset to join this network when this network has pretty much nothing but weirdos that are trying to figure out what technology does.
[48:03] And then the internet expands and then many other people join. And in fact, those people might actually not be the explorers. Those people are more interested in having a comfortable service that works and they don’t want to have to build their own server, they just want to have like someone else that take care of them. And therefore the internet has evolved to accommodate these
[48:25] new population with services that are accommodating in this feudal sense of like the technology operators. And so the challenging question is like today, I think that my intuition, and I hope I’m wrong, my intuition is that the majority of the population today has lost the muscles of actually seeking autonomy. And, yeah, it’s at the expense of like seeking comfort and convenience and whatever, right. And so If we want to craft a
[49:01] meme, but if this meme is actually something that only those mindsets that are still looking for, we want to do it yourself, we want to actually empower ourselves and interconnect with other people, as opposed to the other mindset, which is we want someone to tell us how to do things right, right, because we don’t like how it works now. So, you know, Balaji, tell us what to do.
[49:28] So the challenge that I see is that we can craft a meme that is very salient to those people that were the early internet users and that have maintained that muscle, but that meme will not be salient to a very large population that actually just shut down their autonomy muscles and just wants to have someone taking care, like the good king to take care of them. As opposed to, therefore, if we
[49:55] have to craft a narrative where we want to contaminate all the mindset, This narrative will be very different because it needs to be appealing also to people that are actually more like followers as opposed to explorers. So the challenging question is like, are we, like where do we want to put ourselves? Like, as we’re building this narrative, do we want to be extremely, extremely specific and extremely salient, but only to a
[50:25] very small portion of the population and hoping that this will give an example for other people to see, oh, actually, I would like to use my autonomy muscles as well. Or do we want to try to reduce the saliency of the narrative but cover a much larger space, which becomes more like a populist approach. But of course, then we don’t filter anymore, because we just have something that is
[50:48] pleasant to everyone. But it’s pleasant also to people that will not act upon it because they they don’t want that. They are not yet. There has not been the cultural change that makes it such that the meme we want to convey is ready for that the population is ready for this meme. And they’re orthogonal. They’re almost like, you know, vertical and horizontal.
[51:07] So the set of memes that you would be propagating broadly should be memes that are associated with health. Memes that are associated with individuals orienting themselves on an up gradient towards more capacity to engage with the world. We have to recognize that we’re dealing with humans that are very very far away from just being ordinary humans in terms of the capacity to do things like, as you said, think or engage or
[51:31] have agency. And so there’s a massive healing problem in many, many, many, many different ways, probably about 9 different dimensions that has to happen. And this can happen hyperlocally, I mean, at the individual level. And so there’s 1 set of means that are deployable for everybody. And the point is they have to be, I don’t know if I say it
[51:49] right, they have to be singular, they have to be unique because each individual has a particular frontier of where they are able to go next. You can’t build a general purpose solution for them. They can, you can build a universal solution that is then perfectly singular. And then in the vertical, you are actually dealing with a cluster of seed crystals. So you have potentiate precisely that tiny fraction,
[52:14] and it may be, you know, 1000 people to begin with, who are ready, willing, able to step into something. But the point is that those, the selection function is those people are by nature and by competence oriented towards cultivating the next trophic cascade. And so the thousand becomes 10, 000 and it’s not a linear growth. It’s not that 10, 000 are the same as the 1, 000, it’s rather that
[52:35] the 1, 000 create a new field effect that labels 10 more people to attach because the thing just got easier to do. That’s how the Internet worked, remember? In the beginning, if you couldn’t actually hard code HTML, you couldn’t make a web page. Then somebody came along and made a tool that made it easier for people to make web pages which meant more web pages are being produced by more people,
[52:57] etc. So On the 1 hand side, there’s a story about, let’s build this seed crystal. And the people who are participating in that seed crystal are by nature, the kinds of people who are going to be doing the creative hard work. We’re not looking for them to all be leaders per se. Because as we said, that’s not even a useful concept. But we are looking for them to be taking their
[53:18] proper responsibility in their proper role. And the memes that that community is going to be experiencing, the culture that it’s going to be experiencing, is going to be oriented towards a deeper ontology. Like an actual ontological shift because the post-Enlightenment ontology is running out of gas and we are recognizing that things like identity and relationship and duty can’t actually be sustained in post-Enlightenment memes.
[53:46] So that leads to a deeper question of what exactly is the right way of doing that. And I think the early internet got it, where we’re starting with an aesthetic. We’re starting with felt relationship. We’re starting with a quality of engagement that is only partially articulated in anything that looks like narrative and is much more like the structure of the environment through which the interaction takes place.
[54:14] And then on the horizontal, you’re building the tools to facilitate the healing and empowerment of increasingly larger numbers of people to be able to step into their agency. And those are going to look like a lot of really prosaic things, you know, community health, ways to help people eat well and feel good and be connected to other people. But each of these is going to be connected with this environment in a
[54:38] fashion that invites and draws people progressively deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper into the richness, the, how do I say this, the richness, I mean, like the, the full bandwidth nature of what it is like to be in proper relationship with these ideas and these people. And so it sort of works, and there’s a kind of a model that I’ve been recently calling the lotus model, which some of you [55:03] might be familiar with. The outer petals of the lotus are very easily accessed. They’re very open, very inviting, and they draw people in. But as you go deeper into the lotus, the petals get progressively more tight, more intimate, more committed. And so the initiation process is a natural gradient, and at the center of the lotus, you have the seed crystal, the people who are holding the deepest commitment
[55:27] and the strongest bonds. And this, by the way, is not a cult. It’s actually the opposite of a cult, because the outer petals are always open. People can always leave. There’s no coercion. But there is an invitation to deeper and deeper relationship, deeper and deeper commitment, deeper and deeper participation. And this is, I think, how network nations can actually grow is through this lotus model where you have a core
[55:52] seed crystal of deeply committed individuals who are then creating the conditions for more and more people to progressively deepen their engagement. I love that. And it’s, thank you for this reflection. I think it’s also, it reminds me a lot of the way that commons communities have historically operated, where you have this gradient from peripheral participation to core stewardship. And I think the challenge for us
[56:18] is to make sure that this gradient is always alive and always inviting. So that the meme of the network nation is not just an intellectual proposition, but it’s actually an experience that people can enter into at whatever level feels appropriate for them. Douglas, do you want to add something? Well, I’m really thinking also about the way that these new memes get communicated. And I think the power of what you’re both
[56:45] describing is that the meme of the network nation can be experienced before it’s understood. You participate in it before you can articulate it. And that’s actually how the most powerful cultural shifts happen. They don’t happen through pamphlets and manifestos. They happen through people having experiences together that transform the way they see the world. And so if we can build these structures
[57:10] that allow people to experience what it’s like to be in a network nation, even in a small way, even in a very local way, that experience becomes the most powerful meme of all. Because once you’ve tasted what it’s like to be in a trust-rich, commons-based, mutually supportive community that’s connected to other communities around the world, you can’t un-experience that. And that’s what we need.
[57:35] We need to give people the taste. And then the articulation, the narrative, the intellectual framework, that comes later. But the experience has to come first. That’s beautiful. Thank you both so much for this incredibly rich conversation. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground from the early internet ethos to the current crisis of narratives to how we might think about building
[57:58] network nations as both a concept and a lived experience. And I think the key takeaway for me is that the meme of network nations is not just a story we tell, but a world we build. And the way we build that world is through these deep relationships, through these commons-based structures, through this gradual invitation from the periphery to the core. So thank you both.
[58:22] We will continue this exploration in the coming episodes. Next time, we’ll be diving into the concept of commons, mutualism, and entanglement with Sara Horowitz and Michel Bauwens. So stay tuned for that. And as always, you can find us at networknations.network, and we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks for listening everyone.
Key Themes
- Collapse of post-war master narratives and the Cambrian explosion of governance experimentation
- Early internet ethos: autonomy through interdependence, shareware culture, and bottom-up coordination
- How libertarian memes co-opted the internet counterculture and the distinction between early internet freedom and current corporate libertarianism
- The commons leadership paradox: commons movements attract people who resist top-down leadership
- Pre-Enlightenment ontologies and indigenous concepts of responsibility (kuleana) as alternatives to liberal individualism
- The “super saturated solution” — potential for rapid trophic cascades in network movements
- The “lotus model” for growing network nations: open outer petals, progressive deepening toward core commitment
- Experience before articulation: the most powerful memes are lived, not told