Let a thousand societies bloom

I like many of these attempts at creating new communities. One thing I have noticed with many of them is that none of them have progressed to the point where there is a first follower - someone who isn't part of the originating culture but is induced by something to join. As an example of one that I find interesting is the Esmeralda project, led by Devon Zuegel. These things select for the kind of people who will attend a talk on crypto, rationalism, urbanism and so on every evening. I imagine that this is intentional to start with. You need some critical mass of true believers to get things off the ground.

But is that really the property of every successful community? I imagine that, like a tree, the majority of us are the trunk, the phloem that conducts the resources through, so that there are leaves and fruit and so on. I have no problem being the trunk of such a community, but I don't think I can be the fruit.

I don't mean in a non-participatory sense. I mean that if the leaders are the High Priests, then the rest of these people are the rest of the clergymen, but they have no laymen at the sermon yet.

I can't see these "societies" as anything more than toys for rich people. They simply aren't real. Creating a real society with so few people just doesn't work. You have to rely on a lot of input to make the society work which means you are defacto relying on the external structures to make your utopia function.

These are nothing more than going to weird conferences for an extended time at best, and the setup of a cult compound at worst.

Consider basic things like "How do we get food, water, sewage, trash taken care of". No way these little societies aren't simply fudging when it comes to those problems.

Much like the Hundred Flowers campaign led to the Anti-Rightist campaign, an Archipelago model makes it easier for the ambient sovereign power to crush and destroy the various micro-societies that interfere with its agenda.

Scott (redacted)’s original fictional instantiation of this theory worked around this problem, as I recall, by pretending no pre-existing sovereign power was around.

What crypto purists don’t appreciate is that money, commerce and economic activity is all a social function they’re not “technical problems”

When I first read the Satoshi white paper the immediate response I had as somebody who has studied political economics is that “this will never work because governments will never allow for disintermediation of their currency because it’s one of, if not THE, primary sources of control over a population”

The promise of crypto fundamentally misunderstands how humans work, relate, exchange, and negotiate energy and power.

Contracts are just an extension of politics, digital contracts are no different