NN Ep:7 Meta-Politics: Designing Digital Environments for Civic Power with Audrey & Nathan Schneider

Transcript

I'm extremely anxious about the word meta because of how it's been used in so many different ways. Like in tech culture when I hear meta generally I hear an evasion of responsibility. We sent 200,000 text messages SMS to random numbers around Taiwan asking one simple question. What to do about information integrity online? People gave us very good ideas. Uh let's label all the advertisement is probably scammed. uh until just digitally signs of it. >> For a decentralized network like a a blockchain, you need a centralized protocol. You need and and often a foundation that's kind of guiding the development of it.

>> If we show constant adaptability, the ability to self-heal to care I think that is a very important foundational uh principle and and I call this civic care. And so I've been building a micro site, a research project in Oxford called sixpack.care. Um, and so in this website it shows the six mechanisms uh by which that the civic care can exercise itself. >> Today we are exploring a new question, a fundamental question which is what kind of digital environments are needed for civil society to govern itself effectively and at scale. And this is what we call metapolitics which is

different from the everyday politics of like right-wing or leftwing but rather focus on the meta architecture that shapes political life. And so we all know that technology is neither good nor bad but it is also not neutral. And so the platform and the protocol that we use today actually define how decisions can be made and also what kind of collective action is or is not possible. And so in this sense our digital infrastructure is to a large extent governing us. And the question that we want to explore today is whether we can actually design those digital infrastructure in a way that can help us govern ourself instead.

And so we're joined today by two amazing guest speakers who have been exploring this challenge in the front line. One from inside government and one from an academic standpoint but also from the world of digital commons and cooperative governments. So Odre Tang served as the first digital minister of Taiwan and pioneer perhaps some of the most interesting experiments in digital democracy from the civic hacking movement go zero to the particip participatory platform v Taiwan is also the co-author of the book plurality the future of collaborative technology and democracy which

essentially presents a vision on how technology can be used to strengthen democratic participation rather than undermining it. And then Nathan Schneider is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and also the author of the book Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. And Nathan has been exploring the question of implicit feudalism in today's digital platforms and how concentrated power and extractive corporate practices actually fragment online community rather than empowering them. Nathan is also a leading voice in the platform cooperativist movement where he's exploring how we can actually build

digital spaces where community are actually owning and governing those spaces. And so together we will explore how network nations can be regarded as metapolitical environment that embed democratic values directly into their own government substrates. Hopefully managing to transform digital infrastructure and network technology from those instruments of corporate control into mechanism that are actually promoting civic engagement and democratic empowerment. Cool.

Thank you both for uh joining us. Um I'm very happy that uh you get to meet um Andre and Nathan for the first time on this podcast. Hopefully it's going to be a fast and long collaboration that emerge. So we're going to jump in immediately. So the topic today is uh metapolitics. Uh we're going to explore a little bit what it is and then how it applies to networks. >> Cool. Yeah. And I think uh we would love to bring you Nathan in um to kind of like you know set the ste scene together with us and help us unpack the meaning of metapolitics. you published um a very interesting book like about a year ago I think um called governable spaces and I think the idea of governable spaces

really resonates a lot with this concept of metapolitics and especially how it intersects with the um you know like infrastructures um which are confining like the environments in which we are as a society coordinating in the first place. So um yeah, maybe you can help us um understand the concept a little bit better and maybe ref a little bit on your book and the insights from your book. >> Sure. Um and first of all, thank you for having me and and it's such a pleasure to meet Audrey. Um good to be with you, Felix and Prima Vera. The first of all also that the other preface is that I'm extremely anxious about the word meta because of how it's been used in so many different ways. Like in in tech culture when I hear meta generally I hear an

evasion of responsibility. Oh let's go Meta. Let's you know like the company Meta became called Meta when it was trying to escape all this accountability for political crisis that it had created. And so, um, I think we need to be very anxious when people, um, go meta and and try to transcend the the the real problems that that our world is is facing. Um, but I do think it is important to allow ourselves to talk about something like metapolitics and and we can come to that historically. We with the recognition for instance that the structures that we take for granted today for our political life like the

the nation state and so forth are you know very very recent developments especially as universal forms. The expectation that every piece of land on earth would be the dominion of one country, you know, is just a relatively recent idea born of a particular uh European experience related to the reformation and wars of religion and that sort of thing and and then got spread through a series of historical accidents and is not the only way that we could organize the world. And in in governable spaces, the book you mentioned, I explore um the possibilities of of governance in online space. And and the more you work out

those possibilities and and and play with them and see where some experiments and tendencies could lead, you start to realize, oh, oh, this this metapolitics of say the nation state might start to break down pretty quickly. It's not going to last. It doesn't hold up against the possibilities of self-governing online networks. Once you start being able to be a citizen of a of of a network, um once you start seeing politics as connected to the fact that hey, right now we're talking across all these continents, we're building community across all these political territories. Maybe that community itself is a kind of emerging politics. Then you

start to realize, oh boy, we're not just talking about, oh, let's make a minor tweak or reform um around online platforms, but you start seeing a different kind of politics emerging. And I've really become obsessed with that right now. And that's it's that kind of thinking that uh is is driving a lot of my my current work now. >> Super interesting. Um yeah so I think like one of the decisive factors in shaping new forms of politics and or political organization to emerge in the first place are of course like the technological infrastructures which with in which they are taking place. So you are um outlining quite interestingly I think also in your book how the current environment is constraining a lot of civic organization and the potential

indeed of like self-s sovereign communities to emerge. Um maybe you can help us unpack a bit like what is the the problem space a bit at the moment like how do these environments look like? How do they shape our political actions? And how could alternatives be formulated? >> Well, I think I think the problems come from a few directions. The the limitations I should say. One one is kind of technical. Um there are certain aspects of the the architecture of the web in particular around the server client relationship which puts a lot of power in where the server happens to be located geographically. Um, and that becomes a kind of point of failure, especially in relationship to

territorial nations. And this goes back to the very earliest online communities with BBS's when people started realizing, oh wait, you know, I have legal liability for all the conversation that's happening on this server sitting in my house. And that played out all the way to, you know, major tech companies located in particular jurisdictions holding huge data centers and realizing, oh, we have legal liability for the stuff here, too. And then norms formed around that. norms that expect that that didn't expect democracy that didn't expect participatory spaces because you know we were kind of running on the idea that oh we're just you know being hosted by the house party was kind of the the

metaphor of a lot of these um early communities or even the commune which often had a kind of dominating leader. uh there were a number of these metaphors that that didn't need democracy and didn't need practices of of democratic life to be built in and so they weren't built into our online tools. Um and then now we see the kind of all-encompassing nature of of territorial regulation um with um you know with the rise of of of blockchains and cryptocurrency. You know love them or hate them um doesn't really matter.

It's just a piece of technology. But it it does um it did present the possibility of departing from that old client server relationship and actually having networks designed to be co-governed by multiple participants. So there you have a chance to to actually exit some of those old constraints. But then territorial regulation stepped in and said, "No, actually we're not going to respect your DAO as like an organization. You know, you have to double register it as a company with us and and we're going to basically take out all the possibilities of uh that would enable you to do anything new."

Um, and you know, that's in part for some really good reasons. um you know how else are you going to get a certain kind kind of accountability but on the other hand it's constrained the kind of institutional creativity that that the technology itself could enable um I think the trick is is this technology is is sticky in a way and can do things that other you know past regimes can't and even though it's been slow to take hold in a lot of people's everyday lives it is slowly growing in its in its in its stickiness and and we're seeing regulations start to develop new relationships with it. And um and as this occurs, I think it becomes more and

more inescapable that we end up with network native forms of organization, network native forms of self-governance, um network native forms of of economic life that challenge that that monopoly that the the Westfallian nation state has had for the past few centuries. So I can add a small uh uh followup to this. Um I'm actually very interested in like do you see that uh like how do you see the relationship between those different flavor of governable spaces? Um but like online where you have like um you know you have like the centralized the centralized student system uh which is coexisting with the more the

centralized system and like uh what's the relationship with them but perhaps more importantly like the extent to which you see the governmental space of the nation state or like the the more legacy one actually is it do you see a relationship between for instance like the nation state it is promoting or impinging upon some of those design structure uh of governance online and vice versa. Do you see how the advant of some of those online uh governmentable spaces you know whether it's like the functional sovereign that all of student have like more power than than the nation state or those decentralized infrastructure is there like a symbiotic is there a non

symbiotic is there a competitive relationship between the more like nation state structure and uh online structures >> well I think they've they've kind of gotten into a lock right now you know at least in in in the US for instance the context I I know best where for instance whenever something seems to go wrong in online space like you know children are being abused or or politics is going ary or all sorts of things. What happens is is, you know, the the people who consider themselves the responsible parties in government haul in the CEOs of the biggest tech companies um either to pay homage, you know, as as seems to be happening a lot today, or to be

grilled in Congress and and asked all kinds of embarrassing questions and so forth and and and having to perform for 13 hours in front of cameras or something like that. In all these cases, the implication is you're the boss, you figure it out, you're in charge of this whole thing. Um, rather than what you know, and I think I think Audrey's work is a really really powerful counter example of this is to say, what if we treated the solutions to problems online um through a lens of democracy?

What if we saw democracy and self-governance as as as a way to solve these problems rather than um reinforcing the autocratic tendencies of the server client relationship and every time we bring those people in and seem to be making them accountable, we're actually just reinforcing their power. So, so I think you know and again Audrey has been such a leader in this um we could have an approach where we say okay in every every time we confront a problem about about platform labor about you know social media speech about infrastructure we said how could we insert democracy into this into this problem and enable people to solve it in all kinds of different ways all at once

um that's how we solve a lot of problems in other contexts um but in online space it's It's always this this idea that oh, you know, we need to haul in the 25-year-old who's in charge of this thing and and give him a talking to and and and and reinforce that that assumption that that that dude usually a dude is in control. >> Yeah, I think I mean that's a perfect bridge also to um you know move to you maybe Audrey. I think also interestingly you often speak of democracy as a social technology and I think that kind of echoes to a certain extent some of the insights Nathan just shared about governable spaces and the design and the design options which are enabling or uh you know constraining civic society. So

to me at least and I think Nathan was already briefing on that as well um uh plurality the project that you're currently pursuing with a lot of other people and movements together uh is a metapolitical project in itself to a certain extent and because it tries to design like a different substrate for others the democracy which enables new ways of you know like deciding together deliberating together acting together so yeah I just wonder like what does this term um metabolic tics mean to you And how can we maybe also leverage it to you know enhance democracy in the future?

>> Yeah, when I hear meta I think foundational right. So what are our foundational substrates for coordination? uh turns out these are the protocols that people follow and once people have a better protocol to resolve conflicts uh people's imagination of conflicts change instead of viewing conflicts as fire on the ground to be put out we start seeing them as fuel for co-creation u like before combustion engine after combustion engine people have very different perceptions uh when it comes to fuel um and again fuel or fire we need some sort of substrate to harness that into energy. So for example, uh Nathan just talked about the

harms uh caused by online platforms. For example, last year uh last um March there was a lot of deep fake uh advertisement suddenly appearing uh on Facebook, on YouTube here in Taiwan. It's usually Nvidia CEO Jensen Fu uh trying to give you some crypto or giving you some stock options or investment advice uh to give back to his country or something. Um but the idea is that we do not need to uh ask like Meta or YouTube or Tik Tok CEOs to our legislation uh to uh hold them accounts. We actually can ask everyday people because we already had a protocol in this case called alignment assemblies uh working with the

collective intelligence project. We sent 200,000 text messages, SMS to random numbers around Taiwan asking one simple question, what to do about information integrity online. And people gave us very good ideas and thousands of people volunteered. And then we chose randomly 450 people representing the same demographics as Taiwan in rooms of 10 like 45 rooms facilitated by an AI to figure out what to do uh when deep fake uh harms come for advertisement platforms. And for example, one room said, uh, let's, um, label all the advertisement is probably scammed, uh, until Jess Hong digitally signs off it.

Very good idea. Another room says, if somebody gets scammed, $5 million because of the investment scam, instead of finding Facebook, let's make them liable for the full damage if they run an unsigned ad. Again, very good idea. And another room says, uh, Tik Tok at the time didn't have a talent office. So if they don't uh comply uh let's not block it because censorship is bad but let's slow down connection to their servers uh until all their advertisement business go to their competitor and so all these ideas uh are aggregated by a language model we read them back people vote more than 85% of people agree in April we check with all the big tech for feasibility they're feasible by May the digital signature act gets passed uh working with trust systems in kind

decentralized notary and people love that idea and Then in July the entire law anti-skim law passed. So this year you don't just don't see any deep fake ads anymore uh in Taiwanese social media. So that's a very concrete thing saying for each incoming harm whether it's Uber like 10 years ago or deep fake ads last year we can go through the same protocol so that we can democratically uh let me do this again. So that we can democratically steer uh the incoming technology instead of just pushing the pedal or pushing the brake. >> Right. And um what do you think are the most relevant design levers we have at the moment? So there is a question I guess uh to which extent we can actually from a public or civic perspective shape

the platforms which are currently dominating you know fields in which uh civic uh you know communities are organizing. A lot of this is happening at the moment in uh you know big social media platforms. Uh these come with uh certain constraints and problems. uh you know the algorithms are often skewed. Um there is manipulation happening, deep fakes and and polarization partially intended is being incentivized there. Um so how can we shift and move the playing field to something which is maybe co-constructed by civic society new and alternative platforms?

>> Yeah, I think freedom of movement is really the key here. Right. In the state of Utah, uh we as in the Project Liberty Institute uh work with leaders from both parties and the governor uh to pass a law which is already in effect that says starting next July if you're a Utah citizen uh and you want to migrate from one social media network to another. Uh then just like number portability which lets you keep your telephone number when you switch telecoms, the old network is then legally uh required to forward all the new likes, new followers, new reactions, new content to your new network. And so in this very simple design called the digital choices act, this is not something that is about

nationalizing social media. This is not something uh that says social media is bad. No, this is just saying if something better comes along, the old social media network should not make it impossible for people to move into the new network just because they have this network effect. They have iron grip on like the connection to your friends and families. They must give those up for interoperability. And again this is a key decentralized design principle and meta principle if you will which is to enable freedom of choice of movement across all the different solutions because then there will be no incentive for the dominant players today to uh to use cory doctrinal term initify the experience just because they capture the

majority of the market. >> Amazing. Um so this is a very good um leway to um our last little set of question uh because basically what we're trying to do with the network nation is precisely to create a better container a better metabolitical structure and of course the question is how do we design it in a way that actually um endorse and promote the specific values that we want to embed into this um into this vessel. So for uh for just like as a reminder, so the what we're trying to do with the network is that we we're creating a container. Of course, this container can

be filled up uh as people wish, but the container itself embeds specific values and we want to make sure that you know you can be a leftwing and a right wing and you can still create a network like the the the container cannot prevent what's get inside the container. But by shaping specific design structure into that container, it will nonetheless probably influence who wants to use it. But also if you use it is going to influence the way in which you can operate within. And so one one important point of discussion that we want to have with your bot is basically given our meta design principle that we have with network nation. uh which is basically of course the value of plurality, the value

of commoning, the value of interdependence and entanglement. So all all those all those values that we actually want to bake into the technology then how can we construct this vessel in order to design something that can enable promote civic empowerment and civic participation. And so maybe uh Audrea maybe you can uh talk to us a little bit about like uh as you see like but from the perspective of plurality um because plurality I guess is a similar question of like the meta framework of plurality invites many different things but force those things that are inside to still adhere to the plurality principles. So what is your

vision in terms of like of course we want to we want to use network nation as a tool to promote better democratic participation of civil society. Um what do you think should be like the basic uh meta design principle uh that needs to be unconditional uh into when we think about the design of an international? Yeah, definitely. uh I think uh the idea of meta or foundational uh principles is very important because if we design the protocol's rights then it has the ability to self-heal to care for the polity itself and if it spirals out of control then that's a perfect excuse for

some nearby polities maybe nation states to say oh these people cannot take care of themselves and therefore um you know a regular Westfallian entity with a army should step in. Right? So, um if we show constant adaptability, the ability to self-heal to care, I think that is a very important foundational uh principle and and I call this civic care. Um and so I've been building a micro site, a research project in Oxford called sixpack.care.

Um and so in this website, it shows the six mechanisms uh by which that the civic care can exercise itself. uh like a in a gym, right? So everybody can grow a six-pack of care. Um and uh these are very briefly um attentiveness uh the ability to turn the ideological divides within one policy into this uncommon ground, the rarely discovered common ground between them. this bridging map of attentiveness, the idea of uh responsibility of uh credible commitments vehicles so that each agent in that policy can make credible commitments that they cannot just override or revoke later. Um competency

the idea of training um agents using reinforcement learning on community feedback. So like drafting better committee notes that bringing people along and how to use constitutional AI to build such agents. So that's competency and finally uh responsiveness the ability to do local social cultural evaluation so that people can see whether those mechanisms are really fitting people's needs and if not um there will be a ongoing eval evaluation of these uh mechanisms based on the local social cultural expectations. So that's one loop and then finally the agentic infrastructure that provides like agent ID meonymity partial anonymity so that the whistleblowing is

easy and cooperation is easy but it also uh is verified uh input and finally symbiosis bounding uh the agents uh or the protocols to a local care uh moroscope instead of a paperclip maximizer. So that's the main idea of the six pack of care. I would just love to hear a bit more about how how you would imagine how you imagine instantiating some of these ideas and and and a couple thoughts about that. First of all, like for instance, when you think about existing decentralized protocols, they they embed certain values and not others. stay in bed like the value of property but not

and and and the the value of care is instantiated in very limited ways like through mining or whatever. For instance, no instantiation of like care for the people who are involved that the protocols unlike for instance the Federal Reserve never check in on whether the people involved are employed. you know, the Federal Reserve has to ask once in a while when making decisions about the money system, hey, are people having jobs? You know, and it's interesting that that none of the, you know, the cryptocurrencies we've seen have ever asked that. I I'm also curious about what the the degree to which you you can see these kinds of values being embedded in a kind of decentralized way or a kind of

centralized way. And I asked this because I I think that sometimes we imagine that we can decentralize everything. And I I've come to think that some things are are going to be centralized in the same way that like to have a decentralized network, you need a centralized, at least in our current systems, a centralized antitrust authority. For a decentralized network like a a blockchain, you need a centralized protocol. You need and and often a foundation that's kind of guiding the development of it. Um, so I I've come to see these two things as kind of a plur as a as a as as bound together. And so I'm curious about how you think about actually implementing some of these some of these principles.

>> Yeah, definitely. Uh I think uh the first uh attentiveness pack talks about the idea of bridging systems like Polus um or the community system uh where the relational health between two subcommunities on X.com or nowadays also YouTube and Facebook um is not measured by a simple vote like whether you can get a majority endorsement from your users. No. Right. when you see a committee note and vote on it, um it measures the unlikeliness of two groups of people or more uh that like almost always don't vote uh the same like they're very polarized the left wing and the right wing and in a adversarial uh environment like x.com that is the norm.

uh but there's like this fringe uh upwing uh the very rare kind of nodes that do get support from the left wing and the right wing that don't usually vote uh the same and so these are the upwing and then the idea of community nodes now in their experiments um is first to train AI system to draft such nodes and reward AI systems when they can increase the bridging potential of each nodes to bring those two people um fragment ments uh together again uh to achieve internal coherence for a sub community. And because of this uh ongoing training, they can also kind of predict like what kind of ideas will

bring these people together in the next um like rumor cycle uh so that they can almost pre-bunk uh such issues uh and depolarize in advance. So that's a very good protocol uh to have and they're trying out on a subset of x.com users now to have that kind of bridge making potential to be their main sorting algorithm instead of the current algorithm which is kind of engagement through enragement. So that is one very concrete case uh using a local moroscope policy to train for bridge making and to prioritize relational care as measured by the unlikeliness of the ideological camps to agree and then the potential for the bridging notes for them to

cohhere. >> I think like out of the six pack I think there are some that are potentially uh bakeable into a technological design. uh I think some of them might not some of them are more like social technologies which I guess cannot really be baked into the structure and it's more like I guess some network nation might choose to adopt some of them and some network nation might choose not to and then it's more like what works and what doesn't work uh hopefully the one that choose to adopt them will be competitively superior and survive better but uh I think like there is there specific things that really can be

uh embedded into the actual uh I guess social technological design as part of the framework and then I think there are things that we can perhaps promote or suggest uh without necessarily embedding them as part of the the problem is that when you create a vessel unfortunately people will just do whatever they want with the vessel and uh and I think what we're trying to think very hardly is like what is the minimal viable vessel that embed as many of those values as we can. But that kind of needs they need to be there for the vessel to work and then kind of like this will nudge whoever see this as a as a powerful vessel uh will

somehow automatically be affected by the technological design of this vessel because it just comes with it right and I think like all the thing about entanglement is is also part of that it's kind of like if you manage to structurally untangle then you can create a better vessel uh but also you come we have to deal now with all the interdependency that you have created through the entanglement and then what are the technology that can help dealing with this interdependency and that's where I think the six pack become very useful >> right which is why I frame the decentralization potential as a freedom of movement uh having the freedom of movement doesn't mean that you move uh around all the time although I I did

travel to like 25 countries the past year and switching time zone every seven days uh that is not a obligation uh right So uh I can at any time decide to stay um like in Taiwan or Oxford uh for more than one week. Uh so the point here is that once you have the freedom to fork um then you have the potential to decentralize uh the system if you find that the vessel needs a different steering. You still have the steering wheel but for most of the time people will probably stay in a poly central fashion some of those central hub points. Um but that's not because they don't like the centralization. It's precisely because they have the right to move away that these poly central points of contact can be made stable.

>> And and I I wouldn't discount the the power of of kind social pressure in in these kinds of systems and say that only the technology provides a hard kind of constraint. I mean I think think how many countries right now have no meaningful democratic mechanisms and yet have presidents right you know and and and I think that's a a a sign of the power of the of the social protocol you know they're perfectly there are monarchies they're perfectly capable of becoming monarchies but they recognize that the kind of mood in the room at the United Nations means it's probably better for them to call themselves a president even if in no way their behavior reflects that um and it and it

and even as long as they do, it still creates a kind of a kind of pressure on them that that their citizens sometimes can exact to say, well, if you call yourself a president, let's actually, you know, let's take this seriously. It it it keeps the seed there. And to me that is one of the most powerful, you know, is a question that is terrifying and thrilling about this kind of possibility about a different metapolitics is what kinds of norms are going to start to take hold and what kinds of and and and so I I'm I'm so glad that when when Audrey's thinking about this, it's not just about what can we encode into the technology. It's also what kind of norms do we want to be widespread as you know as as new kinds of um protocols uh uh are spreading you

know in technological forms and in other kinds of through other kinds of mechanisms. >> Exactly. and and the lines being really blurred, right? Once you have a very good norm uh around these ideas and you have programmable cryptography and you have a strong enough language model tuned to both worlds, uh then you can actually turn some of those ideas into actual code protocol design carrying kind of physics-like code power uh that um instantiates uh those ideas and some of that is being explored by deep gov.org ORC uh which is a funding mechanism using these kind of uh agents politicians uh that are aligned through broad listening and polish technologies

to do funding allocation but you can think of it's not just doing funding allocation that's just the first round but also doing like layer 2 protocol design whatnot >> I think it also works on the opposite direction which is like and I think the blockchain is a good example of that is like sometimes by creating a particular technological artifact uh it creates affordance and constraints that force an actual governance and societal innovation on top because you have to right and I think the decentralized nature of the blockchain has actually created an incredible amount of governance innovation uh because you need to figure out distributed governance and you know it goes in the positive and the negative

direction but the the technological design is actually a trigger that force the social technic system to also innovate at the at the social level. One of the important agenda point I guess uh of the network nation is of course we want to uh make sure that civil society gets actually empowered to act as a political actor. And um we often have these questions when we present network nation and so forth where people are like great uh how is that different from a a well-working online community right and uh and I think that's that's an

important component because of course it's not just uh an online community and so what we're trying to understand is also like from like um like from a design perspective like how Can we uh ensure that these this this metapolitical structure that we create actually enable political political emergence uh but at the level of recognizing uh the community as a political actor and also being able to act as a political actor through collective action and perhaps um I think Nate and you've been working a lot on all the question of like uh uh cooperative and so forth and like there is a A lot like the cooperative is an interesting vessel

which has a lot of pass toward commoning and mutualism similarly to the network nation but it remains mostly driven by economical motives right and so but but yet they have been experimenting a lot with this thing. So to which extent would you see um like what is the shift uh between just being like aggregating together because we have a common economical reason to commune uh versus commoning and treating mutualism and entanglement as a political premises. Well, well, first of all, I I just want to

underscore what you said earlier about the the um what happened with the emergence of blockchains and the kind of breaking of the you know the server client relationship. It really did unleash an explosion of of of of governance experimentation. That's something that, you know, got a group of us to come together and form this organization Metagv and be like, okay, let's let's have a space in which we can compare notes on all that's going on here because none of us can keep it all in our head at once. And it it's what happened in, you know, in some jurisdictions where um you know, my town here in Boulder, Colorado is having our first citizens assembly right now. Um but um but in in in places around the

world that people where people have gotten to this earlier or with participatory budgeting when when cities open the door to say we want to create a new form of participation now we need tools for it you know really really interesting experiments start happening and I think that's that's one of the things that's so important about metabolitics when you shift the ground and some of the premises of of of organizational life really cool explosions of of creativity can occur in this context, you know, around around cooperatives. What, you know, what are the right metaphors for um for for thinking about lessons from from past history? I you know, I think there are some interesting metaphors from from cooperatives. Um and you know, I love

them dearly and and that's a big part of of um of my life and work. But actually, I think in a lot of respects, you know, the the the the comparison does fall short for exactly the reason you said. cooperatives are really really designed around a common business, you know, a common enterprise. Um, and I think that's a bit too limiting for thinking about politics, which which is really about a much more comprehensive view of our of of of our lives and and what they're for and and and what we need to to to flourish. Um, cooperatives, I think, do a lot more of that than other kinds of businesses, but they're still businesses. in these conversations you know with you the first thing that I started thinking about when when I was

reading your work on on on this idea of prima vera is religion you know I think that's where you get a lot more similarity I'm Roman Catholic with Jewish ancestors and you know part of a few other world religions in the mix in my in my family history and so forth and in each of these I see a transnational network um that has forms of economic value that does like a lot of the stuff that people are aspiring toward with these um wi with with network nations, with network states, whatever term you want to use, like it just sounds a lot like religion to me a lot of the time.

And I spent a lot of my life, you know, studying and writing about religion and and um and I just see these intersections um a lot. Um and and you think of the power that these institutions have held. you think about the the the role that they play at at global institutions like the like the United Nations. Um biology talks about diplomatic recognition for network states. Well, religions to a large degree for develop diplomatic recognition. Um and um and of course you know there is this guiding idea this kind of metaphysical um vision that I think a lot of people interested in technology and so forth like get start getting really nervous

about um but you know to some degree or another we're going to start having to have that conversation because hey you know the nation state is built on that as Benedict Anderson you know famously argued in his idea of imagined communities the nation state is built on a kind of religious idea of a state that transcends anybody's actual direct experience. And yet, you know, you can fly from California to to Maine and everybody believes they're part of this same mythical idea of the United States of America. Um, and so I think there's a lot about religion that we need to take seriously if this stuff is really going to fit within the kind of puzzle piece um or fit with the puzzle piece of of of

human beings. Um and you know the question to me is you know what kind of religion is this going to be? Um what kind of belief system and you know shared um you know as as Margaret Levi talks about the shared community of fate um is going to be involved here. I don't think you're going to get um a a deep sense of belonging with just with just uh technical protocols and and and and digital networks. And yeah, this is this this makes a lot of sense. Um what is the what is the religion? What is the new religion that is not a religion? So um in some way it's also like >> so what's so wrong with it being a religion?

>> Yeah. >> I guess we just need to uh reconotate. But I think it's it's extremely relevant because like if we think about nation states they um they acquire they claim their political power because of the territorial sovereignty that they have right like the power come political power comes from territorial control. Um in the case of corporations the power comes from capital and so they all they acquire political capital because because they have so much capital. Um the concept of religion is interesting like the they do have political power and it comes from I guess kinship and culture >> and capital and land

>> and and they acquire capital and land as a result of that. So network nations those uh those those those new political actor what can they drive their political power from? So uh Premier and I first met uh over this tribe right that is online uh that was intentionally designed by a serious evangelical Christian uh Larry Wah uh who um basically applied a lot of um his trainings as a evangelical person uh and also um Shinto and other Japanese culture elements uh into designing Pearl uh not just as a computer language

anguage, but also as a form of people coming together, a a communion uh of sorts. Um, and his documents for designing Pearl uh was called apocalypsis um and uh exugesus uh and synopsis. um and I wrote a a epoa but anyway the point I'm making um is that uh if you think about the wider communities around uh open source free software creative comms um later on open government and nearby adjustments let's just call them open movements and exactly as Nathan said right it started as a a belief an idea a common kind of uh doctrine if you will uh but then it

translated uh to real economic power because it is a new engine. Uh to not just share the burden of maintenance cost but also make permissionless innovation like literally negative cost like it gets rewarded if you can you know find some bugs, bounties and things like that. And therefore we acquired collectively as the part of open movement not just economic power but also agenda setting power when it comes to politics through movements uh to fight like the old cryptographic wars against export control and things like that. And so I think this unifying imagination is really key and it can translate to economic political agenda setting and other powers exactly the way

Nisen described as other organized religions do. >> Right. I think uh another point we're trying to make with network nations and we're trying to you know juxtapose this concept a little bit to the network state is kind of the theory of change right so how can we empower civil society to become a political actor on the global scale um it's a question of how can you enable communities bottom up you know to connect with like-minded communities around the world and start coordinating around shared goals and um I think what sets us a a little bit apart from amongst many things I guess but like um amongst these is also the the what sets us apart from network state is the idea of um self-s sovereignty I feel it's like a important

principle to enable any given community to act um and operate in a way which is not infringed by external entities but I think a lot of the technopolitical imaginations we are seeing out there starting um from the hypothesis of the self-s sovereign individual right like empowering the autonomy and the agency of often you know highly influential you know high um netw worth individuals to expand their reach into new domains. Um I think we are interested in a different notion which we working title I guess at the moment but call self-s sovereign communities. So what does it take in terms of building infrastructure and

with this maybe also coming back to the question of like metapolitics and uh tech designs? what does it take um to build an infrastructure that enables civic communities to operate in a self-s sovereign way um and you know um coales around these shared goals um and I feel like this this this idea and notion of self-s sovereign here really critical because we're living in a world of course where a lot of different forces specific you know corporate elomerations of power but also like autocratic forces are encroaching on the space of democratic deliberation and democratic life per se I think so the question of how to protect these spaces of coordination deliberation and you know

political organization becomes more and more pressing so I wonder if you have some ideas on how we can design these spaces in a way that a allows the bottom up you know emergence of these political agents but b in a way which is protected against uh forces which are trying to you know delimmit that space. So one thought is that this corresponds to the solidarity pack, the fifth pack of the six pack of care framework. Uh in it we argue that just as in the alignment assembly in Taiwan, we sent SMS from the trusted number 111 to 200,000 random numbers around Taiwan. This is a way to combat uh the kind of coercion or

trolling or civil attacks and things like that, right? because you know that it is very difficult to capture such a process if you go like literally randomly to 200,000 uh numbers and um from the civil society side we're now uh popularizing this idea of meonimity uh or selective disclosure is a way to prove for example that you are a resident of Taiwan and therefore part of the polity that try to set the rules of Facebook entering Taiwan or Uber entering in Taiwan but in doing so you do not have uh to reveal where you live or you need to prove uh you're between 16 and um 45 because you're deliberating on use policy but then again you don't

have to disclose your birthday or your name or things like that without such selective um disclosure verifiable credentials um nowadays it's trivial for one malicious ASIS swarm operator to masquerade um as people in that network nation and therefore take over the vibes of whatever community uh there is so a very strong protected deliberator composition based on such uh verifiable credentials but with some way to shield those deliberator from doxing that is to say from getting their personal details revealed. I think this is absolutely critical infrastructure which is why we released the decentralized ID wallets from the Taiwanese uh government in open source. Uh so actually creative comm

zero no copyright so that if you don't trust the government but do trust your local church or temple or uh mosque um they can fork that wallet and still become interoperable and still issue verifiable credential in which you can prove that you're of a legal age or you belong to this organized religion without doxing yourself. >> I I think this is it's such an important question to be asking and it's a really dangerous question. you know, the way things are going right now, this conversation is going is headed in really dystopian ways, right? That are going to enable um some of the worst tendencies of our current tech economy um to just have more more power and

fewer constraints. Um and you see this in how for instance um uh Sharina Vasan is building the network state empire through essentially an investment fund and you know all the kind of accutrament that go with it like um you know accelerators and camps where people are not taken care of well and all kinds of things you know movies we've seen before. Um and the result of that is centralized power. even when he doesn't really say that explicitly in a lot of context, we see where it's going with the practice. Um, and and I think back to I've been having conversations lately with a a a prominent archaeologist named Gary Fineman who's done a lot of work on looking across ancient civilizations at,

you know, what seemed to determine or what it not determined, but what seemed to accompany different kinds of governance structures. and and you know he a lot of his work's been really powerful and eye-opening in recent years showing that it's not a one-sizefits-all thing you know hierarchy is not the only man way to manage large complex societies um but economic forces are really really important and so I think the infrastructure that you know we need to be really attentive to is uh is you know the flows of resources and and and control over resources Um in in uh in these ancient civilizations if there was if people were dependent on imported resources

that a small elite could control that small elite was in control of that society. That's where you get you know big pyramids with kings inside. you know, when you have a society that is totally dependent on, you know, on some e external resources and um uh and and so we need to be really aware of how these economic flows are going and figure out how to ensure that we have something um if we want more democratic, more participatory outcomes that can really compete with or just undermine, you know, the the kind of venture capital centralization story that seems to be really taking hold. a couple of of of techniques I think that are important. One is getting there first.

That's how protocols often get set, you know, and I hate to say it because I like, you know, slow and deliberate processes, but that's how protocols form. It's really important to to, you know, to to to set the mold, set the pattern in place. And um and I think one way that that we can do that um if we're we're we're interested in these these kind of more democratic outcomes is start is starting with civil society as you're saying not just as partners but as actually helping them recognize you are forming network nations already you know build on boots build on the existing infrastructure build on the things that are already out there. help them build the kind of tech the last mile that they need to go from being,

you know, powerful transnational networks um uh uh in in the previous regime to being um the the harbingers of the of the new regime um and and be able to get there, build these scaled things, recognize them, rename them, you know, tell a new kind of story about what these things are. That's a way, you know, to beat the venture capitalists to their own game, you know, to get there first. I think the second thing is to think about poison pills. You know, what are the ways that you can that you can make um doing the wrong thing just so painful that nobody's going to do it?

You know, my favorite poison pill is the the Green Bay Packers. um you know football team you know it's it's everybody you know everybody's favorite American football team because it's still in the small town while every other team uh has gone to the biggest cities and and abandoned their roots. You know the Green Bay Packers are there because they have an ownership structure that says if this team were to sell all the money would just go to local nonprofits. Nobody would get rich. Um so nobody's going to do it. Great. You know you end up with a really pro-social outcome. Let's think about ways in which we can we can just make these systems um uh uh you know make it painful to uh uh to to do something other than the right thing. Um and to make sure we have

really strong primitives too for things like you know soulbound identity you know ensuring that that bypassing people and just focusing on tokens is just not you know is not done. Um it's not something you have to do. we've got the tools available for for doing it the right way. So if you're not doing it the right way, there's probably something wrong with you. These kinds of mechanisms, I think, really need to be established and socialized uh uh to prevent others from swooping in too quickly and setting a set really dangerous set of norms.

>> Just one follow up very briefly because I'm just it's I'm 100% with everything you just said, Nathan. Um I think one bottleneck though which is very crucial and um which we also still trying to tackle in our thinking is the question of funding and scale right um because uh the common challenge um against a lot of the things which u we you know all stated in the past minutes um is that you know this is nice in theory and it's cool to run an experiment on this in a small community but if we want to roll this out on you know like a civic level around the globe then we need to compete with global platforms and there is just not enough funding within civic society and maybe not even in the public sector

anymore at this point to even you know build infrastructures that can compete on that level. So I wonder if that that argumentation is flawed in itself already and if there is a different starting point to the question we should consider. So is it is the goal always you know to achieve the certain scale that we can compete with these kind of you know megalomanic massive infrastructure which are being built by big tech or is there maybe a different theory of change that we can apply here th this is a lesson I learned from cooperatives right is that is that it's actually very weird that startup you know tech startup culture is all about we've got to start from nothing and go to everything um that is a really

expensive proposition And you know, for better or worse, they've figured out the economic models to make that work. Um, but that's like that's a weird and screwed up way of doing things. Um, and what cooperatives do when they and and cooperatives have a really really hard time doing that because they don't have access to those mechanisms. But what cooperatives are really good at is taking existing economies and actually just making them more efficient. You know, I mean, a case of this that, you know, people might be familiar with is um is like uh mutual funds, you know, where where you have where people started realizing, oh, wait a second. if we just took all the investing that people were already doing and put it in something that they

co-owned and um and and they were and they decided they're not going to pay the fees, the super exorbitant fees to the to the fund managers and they're just going to kind of do it at cost and reduce costs as much as possible. You know, they could actually totally transform the financial sector. you know, you have you have national um scaled um uh uh uh uh cooperatives in some industries like for instance hardware in the United States, agriculture in a lot of se in a lot of parts of the world where you know you're able to build massive businesses not by starting from scratch but by taking what's already happening and reorganizing it a little bit um shifting some you know some layer of the the some

key layer of the of the economic activity and and redirecting redirecting it in a different way. And suddenly you're able to build a very large business, a very large kind of economic system without having to reinvent everything because what you're doing is essentially reorchestrating the fabric of of society that's already there and you're valuing what's already there. You know, my grandfather ran a a national cooperative of hardware stores. He did that not by starting from one hardware store and building out to all of them. He did that by creating a um an opportunity that lots of hardware stores and and distributors that were already there that he wanted to support um uh that enabled them to do their business

better. And I think that's that's the chance to figure out how can we use what's already out there. So uh my mom uh actually was a founder of u the homemakers union um at a time uh started as a kind of environmentfriendly agricultural idea um promotion association but very quickly uh became a consumer co-op. So the same logic that Nathan described works not only on the producer side, it also works on the buyer side. Uh and homemakers already have to buy groceries anyway. So this is not about scaling out something. It is about scaling across many different communities so that they come up with a protocol that oh we will only buy like

organic farming products or something and then coming up with some way to negotiate with the producers bypassing the existing intermediaries. But if you look at what the individual members of this still now Taiwan largest uh consumer co-op do well they still just go to by groceries. They do exactly the same thing um they do before just with a slightly different protocol. They enable its replication much easier across smaller communities. And so scaling across is much easier than scaling out when you're working from the buyer side. >> We call this fractile scaling as opposed to scaling up because it's kind of like you're fractalizing the system and then interconnecting. Um and I think uh it's interesting because this is actually

like what we're trying to do with the network nation is not necessarily like we're trying to convey a concept and a framework but in indeed the goal with this conveyance is that many people all of a sudden have this new thing in their head and all of a sudden they can see the world and they can actually see that they might already be part of a lot of those network. It's just that they didn't know the concept existed and so they couldn't see them. And by giving them this kind of conceptual framework, we hope to help people that are already a network nation to realize that they are and then of course take action and not just be an online community or not

just be like a group of friends, but actually recognize that you are a political actor which can also take action um and have political impact. >> Do you have a sense of what those next steps are? the next step for >> when you when you realize that you you're part of a thing that could be a network nation. What are the what are the things you have to do to make it really a network nation? >> Yeah. I mean we try to have this recipe and then we realize that there is no step by step. Uh I think it's more like there are different things that can be done that can enhance. Uh I think the first one the first the first step if there is one step is the naming right naming things into existence. uh and I

think the moment in which you start you have a group of people that starts uh naming themselves as a network nation as opposed to as a group or as a collective already if the if the word network nation means anything uh it's already changing the flavor like all of sudden there is a there is a state shift because now we are a network nation now all of a sudden things will start becoming a network nation because we name it like such we recognize Ourel as such an author start recognizing us as this and all of a sudden it has a performative effect. The way in which you conceive of a group will also modify how the group interacts amongst each other and how other interact with the

group. So I would say like step number one one baseline is owning the concept as part of the collective and then I think there is just like many different ways in many different axis that can be walked through. uh I think there is the question of mutualization of resources commoning the question of entanglement the question of actually like defining what is the shared societal vision that we want and so forth so there is a lot of possible step that goes in different direction but the more you walk into those direction the more likely to become a network nation you are and I don't think there is like a before and after right is it's a it's a progressive you start as a proto network nation and

then pro progressively evolve um into the network nation. Uh but yeah, this is part of the work that we also want to do is uh naming what are those different steps and what are those different like trajectory that can be um pushing towards more networkness. Um but I think just the recognition I think has extreme good power um because because I do think there is so many so many network already out there uh but we just don't know about them because they don't know about themselves >> and maybe I will just add one thing because um I think in our observation there are different entities which

qualify as at least proto network nations asa said but they starting from very different places so you have partially very historical structures like you know diasporas which are network communities across the world which share a lot of features with um what we you know like think of when we describe network nations but they're lacking the technical and governance substrate often to coordinate more effectively on an international scale right a lot of diasporas are still in this kind of like process of trying to claim either territory or trying to establish a state which is very much you know within the imaginary of the westfalian system. So um on that end you know like it might be um the first move might be towards establishing some sort

of like network governance. On the other end, you have a lot of experiments which have amazing technical governance structures, especially in web free space, right? Like Dows for instance, where very sophisticated systems partially, but not necessarily like, you know, like a community of kinship and and the shared aspiration and imaginary about their own community, their belonging and you know the their vision of the future. So in this in this sense their culture and um and other identity formation form for formatting um activities might be much more needed. Um so it's really understanding about it's really about understanding like the starting point from which these different entities um are venturing out into this kind of journey. Um but yeah,

as Prima said, I think part of our work is now to kind of outline these different pathways and um super we would be super thrilled about like you know bring also more people into this kind of work >> and that there's one uh one last important uh discussion that we want to have with both of you u which is something that is often times used as a criticism against like the recipe of biology towards network states but I think it's something that could potentially also apply as a criticism is to network nation. And it's the question of um you know if if if a network nation is a voluntary optin type of network and of course we all want it to be a voluntary optin um there is obviously a

risk that um it leads to somehow a very maybe two align set of individual. Um and one of our uh baseline um hope for network nation is of course that because we have people from all around the world that that belong to this network nation, we might actually ideally increase uh the the bread and the scope or the coverage of different potential different opinion and so forth. uh so that we might be able to address some of the global challenges that nation states which are too focused on their territory fail to address or

corporation which are too profit oriented also fail to address. Um the challenge of course is that because it's an obtain thing. What happen if we end up with like network nation that are just people agreeing with each other and there is absolutely no variety and enough diversity of plurality in order to actually have meaningful conversation that can lead to a better opinion in the end and and therefore being able to address global challenges because of the diversity of uh of at least in the deliberation process. And so um maybe like Audrea I think you you probably have like a strong opinion on that but Nathan as well is like how do we actually uh design this framework that

at the same time invite as much diversity both at the value and at the opinion level but also that uh help understand that this diversity is a positive thing because it can enable better operations if we manage to bridge them. But then how do we ensure that on the one hand so one risk is that not enough diversity only very value aligned people and therefore quite weak at the at the at the deliberation level uh are too much diversity but then we cannot bridge amongst them and then nothing happen but there's a paralysis because we cannot get to agree on anything.

>> Yeah. Well, I mean to me uh democracy needs to be fast, fair, and fun, right? There's no tradeoff between the three. Uh once you start making the tradeoff, then you got into the kind of situation you just described in which there's no fun uh in talking to people who are too different and so you just admit people who are similar, which is fast and arguably fair, but not at some points not fun at all. Right? Because you need diversity in order to have enjoyment. Um and so I think a quick way to turn conflict into cocreation and a culture that builds this uh approaching effect that is to say we um actively enjoy crossing longer distances giving large

bridging bonuses to people who are so different from us that there's a overflow and there's a wraparound right we need to really celebrate this kind of crossing large distances as part of the culture uh otherwise as it risk becoming a cult and not a culture and then it will become like a self-limiting idea. And so to scale across you need to celebrate long distances and the resolution of long distance um differences and conflicts and really take enjoyment in the quick and fair resolution.

>> Yeah. And I I think this is it's a really deep challenge and and one thing I I one frame that I used to think about it a bit is is this idea of innovation amnesia which is this pattern in which people seem to when something new shows up discard important things that they had fought hard to establish in previous generations. Um so for example we could think about um you know the way in which when you switch from sending your mail through the postal service to Gmail you know suddenly you trade a system that doesn't spy on you to a system that does and you know you just accept it because wow it's so fast and and pretty. um or

you switch from taxis to um app-based ride share and dispense with you know generations of labor protections that were um you know that people fought hard for um and and you know I talked before about the you know the Federal Reserve you know like yeah we can have all kinds of critiques but wait a second let's make sure that we still have an economic system that cares whether people are employed um and and I think we this is another reason to that I think a really really crucial divide guiding line between the, you know, the network state idea which is built on startup disruption and a network nation idea could be the idea building on what's already there. Um, building on what on

on the good things that we have established. you know, where we have good universal health care programs, let's not blow those up and hope that we we can reconstruct them because we in the United States know that that's really hard and and we've been struggling to do that for decades and we we can't manage to figure it out. And you know, for those of you who have it, keep it. Um, and and figure out how to build other layers on top of that. And maybe someday you'll replace it with something better, but be careful with the inheritances that we have of of from past generations. And as we build into the future, let's see if we can build on those shoulders um to uh uh for for the next things and not lose, you know, the

gifts that we've been given. um that is I think both like the risk and the real opportunity uh for for this kind of thinking about a new a new metapolitics. How do we relate to the past? How do we make sure that we don't forget the good things uh that that we need to hold on to? So uh within of uh intentional communities which uh we hope eventually will grow into a network nation um we have this um we have this um I don't know this fault I guess uh which which which we call the plurality paradox um which is essentially this uh this this actually acknowledgment from I guess a small degree of empirical experience

that um the more aligned people are at the value level then the more we can actually hold diversity at the opinion level and then because if you share the same value it becomes very fun I guess or very interesting to actually discuss different opinion because we know that we're standing on the same ground and it just happens that you know conceptualization of the world has led to us having different opinion and so it's interesting to explore the thinking space to understand why given the same value we have different opinion visasa uh if you have people with very different values it might become extremely complex to deliberate or to argue or to debate because the opinion

almost don't matter if the value are clashing and so one question that I would love to hear from both of you is like in terms of like these political actors that we are trying to craft with the network nation what is actually uh leading to stronger political capacity uh is it more important to have an accumulation of values in order to hold the diversity of opinion as a positive space of debate. Or shall we actually try to identify people perhaps that have diverse values but that are united by those same problems or those same uh societal vision and therefore we'll also have to somehow figure out a way uh to

work together even though the value are different. Um what's what's your opinion on those? Well, I stumbled on care ethics uh and specifically civic care from John Toronto uh precisely because uh she treated the ability for a community's relationships within those communities uh to have a healthiness uh when it comes to the difference of opinions, their ability to resolve them, to be attentive and take care of each other and so on as the primary uh thing to watch out and to design for. This is in opposition to most other values in

virtue ethics which is about individuals uh who must uh strive to be I don't know courageous or to have great temperaments or to have this um compassionate um like or the ability to show empathy and so on which are all individual uh level traits. Uh the problem of these is that if you uh cultivate for those individualbased traits, it is almost always uh to the implicit exclusion of the other traits that these individuals maybe have no taste buds for, right?

Because people are neurodeiverse. For some people, some virtues are simply less accessible than other virtues. But if you design for civic care, then basically you're looking for people who are inhabiting or are vessels of relationships that are healthy uh and can cultivate such relationships with people who may hold different taste buds uh but uh are also committing to the idea of civic care. So it's almost like aligning to a community practice or process instead of like the individual attributes or traits. And I find that to be very attractive and also agrees with my experience with many intentional

communities. >> Yeah, I I think I want to go back to that word entanglement they used earlier. I mean I I think that's really important piece of the the story and and that values I think can only be part of it. You know values are kind of hard for humans to hold for too long I think in a certain respect and they they bounce all over the place. I mean, we experience that very deeply right now in in this country where, you know, the values have diverged so profoundly um in so many respects. And what holds us together is often just like appearances and just like these these weird little like social norms about like how you show up

in a space, how you drive a car, how you know just like the ability to live together. um you know going to rel places of worship together. You know these these just basic norms are like the tin are the the the tendrils holding us together and they look a little more like ritual than values. Um because they're not actually we have different stories that we tell about why we're doing that thing but we're still doing the same thing. Um and you know the the political philosopher John RS talked about overlapping consensus that holds a society together. And I think that consensus can look a lot of different ways which might be a good thing. You know, some network nations it might be values others it might be you know a thing we do together and we have very

different values and that's okay. Um and and uh you know and some sometimes you know for instance you know in my religious community it's the one place in my in my life a lot of the times it feels like where I'm in context where people have different political beliefs and we're brought together by a shared ritual and a shared story and history. Um, and and I think you need though, you need to recognize that it's that sick uh structure of of of human life that enables us to hold, you know, hold our societies together. And um and and and the entanglement is, you know, is is that recognition that even when we're very different, if we become entangled with each other, um you know, that that

is that's a a way of of enabling diversity to flourish, right? countries that are deeply e economically entangled tend not to go to war with each other because it's just too painful. I think one of the scariest things that's going on right now in the world is is the disentanglement of of of economic life. Um that can pave a way to you know to to really really dangerous conflict. Um and we have to be aware about like the risk again that we take if we challenge the nation state. I mean I live in a in a region that has deep problems with water. If we weren't all part of the same country, we would probably be at war. You know, Colorado would be at war with New Mexico or whatever because like there's just not enough water to go

around and to let us do all of our things. And um and so we need to be very careful. Um recognize we haven't talked about violence um so far. But I think that's that's a question that we need to take really really really seriously because it's a part of the human story. It's a part of what we're capable of. And um when we break apart or or when we we we reimagine our our our political life um uh uh you know we need to we need to make sure that we're really deeply attentive to that that risk of of kind of of of you know the worst parts of our nature coming coming forward in ways that they they are already all around us. Um but but you know could could uh uh surface even even worse. I

would like to um yeah build a little bit on your reflection also maybe bring this fascinating uh conversation to an end. Um I think it's like a beautiful picture you're painting this need to kind of flesh out a we a political community which can you know carry these ideas and ideas that we are discussing here and I think this is also a question we of course asking ourselves for um this platform we're trying to build for network nations um and maybe which other you know organizers are also asking themselves who want to you know bring about different instantiations of you know like digital democracies of the future um is the question basically of like how do we build like a compelling narrative which is you know capturing

the public imagination and I think like one trap we sometimes probably tend to fall into into these kind of spaces where we are operating in uh is that we are of course um being sometimes slightly theoretical about these topics you know there's a lot of abstraction involved in discussing governance discussing institutional designs in this discussing you know the intersections of technologies and all of that and uh to many people um citizens around the world this feels a little bit remote sometimes. So I wonder how we build um a narrative um maybe for network nations but also other instanciations you know like plurality like the cooperative movement and so on um which allows us to broaden the platform which allows us to

bring in you know groups which we haven't you know enclosed in our echo chamber yet um and I wonder if you have some um ideas on you know like what this kind of narrative would have to entail how we would have to send this message out And yeah, maybe we can conclude with that. >> I'll I'll say a bit and then leave it to Audrey to to wrap us up um with something better. But I I think it it's got to start by meaning by by bringing responses to people's real challenges.

You know, it cannot be an abstraction. You know, Marxism spread because the workers were suffering. You know, and it and and and this idea was presented as, hey, this is a pathway to to the classless society and to and more importantly to like having bread on your table every day. And the Westfallian nation state came about not because everyone was suddenly convinced that this was the greatest idea. It came about because there were wars that just seemed intractable until we figured out some kind of compromise and this is a compromise people could live with. Um, and I think when we look at contexts like Gaza, when we look at contexts like like Sudan, um, you know, the the the crisis of politics in the

United States, um, I think we need to make sure to apply these ideas to to those spaces. Those are all spaces and there are many more where the, you know, the nation state is rupturing and climate crisis. Um, that's where we need to focus is how can these tools be be usable for bringing about solutions that people otherwise aren't seeing in front of them because they can only think in terms of what nation states are capable of. >> Yeah. And it's important to realize the wins we had as the broader open movement. Uh, I mean Wikipedia is still top 10 uh websites. Uh there are more and more people using signal um proton uh all of these tools uh that are

precursors right or really enabling factors of those uh network nation aspirations are already everyday tools that solves everyday problems for everyday people. Um and so the importance I think is not just to invent new things but just to popularize the idea that okay in some other domains for example not many people know that um something that's like GPT4 that does reasoning well uh like 03 level uh can run locally on your laptop and actually if you tune it a little bit then it doesn't hallucinate uh as much anymore right so this kind of local edge opensource AI is already everyday technology but not many people know

about these right. So just making popular those ideas that already get um embodiment uh into everyday technologies can uh make interoperability the norm because the more people using these um technologies and protocol the more natural uh it will feel to them to feel that okay nations may be united, states may be united but networks that are only interdependent uh and interoperable and once they got into this interoperable kind of thinking then apply that thinking to the idea of nations. or states or nation states become second nature.

>> Audrey, Nathan, um thank you so much for this fascinating conversation. It was super generative. Um let us maybe know um and especially our listeners where we can follow your work. Um I'm sure a lot of them are eager and excited to, you know, get involved and learn more about it. >> Yeah, you can find my own work at Nathan Schneider.info info or uh the work of my my lab uh the media economies design lab at medlab.host or or metaggov the organization I um am on the board with prima vera on uh with his uh at metaggov.org work great and um as a I think research advisor or something in Metag do check out Metagraph's work um

uh also interoperability between the digital deliberation tools that's another very natural thing uh to bridge into uh and you can find me at rgt.org Thank you so much. >> Amazing. Thank you, bud. [Music]