OTNS: How to Optimize for Reality
Michael Zargham (@mZargham), the CEO of Block Science comes back on the show to help us continue to overthrow the ontological framework of network states from the perspective of complex systems engineering. During the discussion we talk about how network states don't optimize for reality, not confusing the map with the territory, and how an alternative to network states should handle infrastructures. Overthrowing the Network State (OTNS) is a series in collaboration with Blockchaingov where...
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Transcript
Alright. Hello again. You're listening to Overthrowing the Network State, a special podcast series from The Blockchain Socialist. And I'm here again with the high priestess, Primavera de Filippi. And we have a special guest. He is probably one of the biggest names or the biggest brains in crypto, but, I think, like, your, your fame doesn't follow the size of your brain, so I'm glad that I get to post this interview with you. His name is Michael Zargam. He is the founder of Block Science. He's a PhD from Penn in electrical and systems engineering, and he works mainly as a systems engineer and solutions engineer. So, I've had some really interesting conversations with him in the past about cybernetics, about complex systems. And, yeah, you're, like, one of the one of the best people to talk about it that that I found has been able to kind of, succinctly and crisply explain very, very complex ideas to a poo poo brain like me. But today's focus is going to be about the network state. And, maybe, I would like to start with just knowing kind of like your initial thoughts on the network state, especially coming from a systems engineering background?
Well, I will say that when I saw the name of the book, I got really excited because I was thinking, oh, networks, like, you know, resources distributed, spatially separated, politically decentralized, etcetera. And then I started reading the book, and I was kinda like, oh, this is just sort of, like, highly centralized, sort of neo feudal, I don't know. I I I gotta say, like, it didn't really resonate with me even though I thought that it might. And so, you know, digging into it a bit more, you just kinda come to this place where, and I know we talked about this earlier on the podcast, that it's sort of an ideological, treaties. And I think that there's a lot of benefit to overthrowing the network state or sort of reclaiming some of this language because I think there are ideas that could be associated with some of these concepts that are maybe more salient, even more more feasible or more implementable.
Nice. Yeah. It's, yeah. So one of the things, or one of the comments that I've gotten a lot, lately, about this series is, like, oh, you know, I really, I really like it when you guys talk about the, sort of alternatives or what what people, I think, like to, be positive about, or like, they like to hear positive things about the future. And so I want to, base this conversation on thinking about that, on how we can sort of expand upon or, like you say, overthrow the sort of ontology that the network state gives us, but capture the things that I think people are resonating with, at least in the beginning, when they first hear the term network state, and begin to build out kind of, what these type of alternative systems could look like. So let's oh, oh, so let's start with some of the the
the positive sort of initial evocations. Right? So you hear network, and you start to think about things as being, more distributed, ideally, more localized. So I have a, you know, an a environment in which I can participate and that I feel enfranchised, that I'm more aligned with the other members potentially. And I think that he does kinda lean into that. He just takes it to this extreme where you you sort of imagine a, a universe where like everyone around you is exactly like you and you sterilize the relationships with people who don't a 100% agree with you. And I don't think that that's very realistic. I think for starters, like, you know, I have a family. Like, I had to move home to where I grew up in order to have support for my daughter when I have to travel for work, when my wife has to travel for work. And if I start to look at the set of, quote, unquote, infrastructures or, you know, that that I rely upon both social and technical, the set of functions that need to exist in and around me in order for me to, you know, function as an individual, to function as a family unit, to function as a part of a community or ideally many communities that I'm part of, I get a very different picture of the world as something that's inherently more networked, inherently more interconnected, not quite so, you know, I might jump into a different sterile box in Balaji's ontology. But, ultimately, you're sort of choosing between a bunch of very rigid boxes rather than having, like, a more organic interconnected or, like, ecological relation between the various communities that, both provide and consume, the set of functions that we might call a society. So a network society doesn't have the same kind of, rigidity or sterile sterility that I think the the network state ontology has.
And I think I think it goes back to, this is one of the claim that we keep claiming, but we're gonna repeat it once again to try and build something out of that. This is kind of the the the general one of the big criticism that, we encounter of, if you're if you're based on this exit based approach, then you do have to exit from one place in order to enter into an into another place. And so you're actually extremely limiting the capacity of not just interconnection, but the capacity of, like, layering and, benefiting from an existing infrastructure while also building yet another infrastructure. And so if if we if we're trying to, like, to think more in the in a constructive manner, so what are the modalities that do not involve exit and yet that actually brings this more networked mechanism, of dependence, of interdependence, and of collective action without necessarily having to exclude ourselves from the existing infrastructures that, many different institutions are already working to provide.
Yeah. I I mean, the thing to double down on too is this idea that that exit costs are are low or should be low. They they can't be low. The truth is that once you have a family and once you have a certain amount of, let's say, entanglement with the with the world around you, that, like, low exit cost is tantamount to actually not having that relationship. So the moment that you forego this sterilization and try to embrace, quote, unquote, the complexity of the real world, you're going to get you're no longer gonna be able to operate within this assumption that exit costs should be arbitrarily small. And even in the physical world equivalent of the network state where people are voting with their feet exiting one jurisdiction to go to another, you can examine things like the Free State Project, which involves people migrating to New Hampshire and then, like, largely advocating and lobbying in the state of New Hampshire for more libertarian ideals. That's the closest thing that I know of to the the sort of just exit where you are and move to this other place. And that, a, comes with high exit costs for the families that I do know who moved to New Hampshire. It wasn't, it wasn't easy. It's expensive to move across country. And two, even once they get there, they they don't actually agree on everything. It's not like like New Hampshire is some perfect idealized libertarian state. I mean, their motto is live free or die, and there's some interesting events around the libertarian ideals. But, ultimately, it's still a member of The United States Of America. It has only a certain amount of, you know, states' rights. And although it would generally advocate for more states' rights, even the libertarians there don't have unilateral control over the state's decision making. So the in practice, the thing that exists that's like this doesn't work at all like the story that's being told. Terms and conditions may apply
when you, go to New Hampshire.
One one thing to I think is, like, there's the important point about exit cost, but I think there's another point that I would like to add into the conversation, which is the, the, I don't know, bootstrapping cost or the rebuilding from scratch cost. Because, again, if if it's if it's about exit, not only it needs to be easy to exit from a particular system, but you also need need to be able to go to a new system where the cost of actually rebuilding the wall infrastructure necessary in order to actually create order to actually create a society are also not completely exacerbated, because then you're exiting to what? You're exiting to a place where there is, in fact, no existing infrastructure, who is gonna take care of this infrastructure.
Right. Yeah. And I think that the in question of infrastructures is actually the right one. So, like, let's take another concrete infrastructure, not just necessarily the societal infrastructure of a state like New Hampshire, but something like an Internet service provider. Like, it's extremely difficult to exit your ISP because you have a physically entrenched monopoly on the wires that move the bits around. There are places where people didn't have Internet or didn't have good Internet where they've built cooperatives that maintain mesh networks. I believe there's one in the Berkshires in in, Massachusetts, that a friend of mine is, participating in. And it it's pretty cool, but it's a lot of work. Right? Like, you still have to build, operate, maintain, and govern that infrastructure. And, again, this is just one function. When we start to talk about, like, society, both socially and technically, there are, you know, dozens, maybe arguably hundreds of kinds of, day to day hidden invisible activities that that, that create the experience of society that we have. And if you're abstracted far enough away from those things, it's easy to forget how much labor by how many people in how many different institutions actually goes to design, develop, operate, maintain, and govern all of the things that you rely upon on a day to day basis. And these aren't products. It's not the consumer apps in front of you. They're the, they're the the infrastructures like the roads and the power grid and the Internet and your water supply and you know? You know? Then, god forbid, you get into things like the economic policy making. I recently had a a great, I had a guest from, the power authority here giving a lecture at a unconference we hosted it talking about all of the not just technical work, but the policy making that goes into ensuring that the the power grid remains stable, sharing resources, you know, within across zones and even across national borders. And, again, there's sort of this presupposition that all of these things could be sterilized, disjointed, and provisioned independently, when in reality, they're, they're they're, again, they're quite entangled.
One of the kind of funny thought experiments I've I've had is, like, what how do you handle these types of societal things, this type of infrastructure in like a, you know, say you're in the keto network state, how do you handle roads in a keto way if like, you know, network states are built on this one commandment? Like, what kind of weird things can pop out of, like, I don't know, keto extremists wanting, like, very specific things in, like, you know, their architecture that that or infrastructure that, may or may not be feasible, and what types of, disagreements that could allow? Well, I mean, ultimately
okay. The the keto network state as would be still physically distributed. So unless you created a sufficiently large keto municipality in every location that it manifested in, you would where it you would where it started to have the capacity to provision its own infrastructures, it would necessarily be relying on on other network states to provide. So let's just take this from a software analogy for a moment. Imagine that the network state is, like, kind of like each network each network state within this system is a microservice, and that microservice has some endogenous and some exogenous functions. Meaning, it serves itself. That's its endogenous. Like, it has its one commandment and, you know, everyone in the keto network state has these, you know, keto rules that they follow and they choose to be part of it. But then, okay, what does the keto network state export? Like, how does it what does it what does it do to serve the rest of this networked economy so that it can receive, you know, food? Like, Like, literally, unless it's growing its own food, maybe it's a farming commune. I don't know. But, how about Internet? How about power? How about water? Where do they come from? Well, in principle, it needs a positive trade balance, so it's gotta export something. So if I'm a keto network state member software developer, then where does my computer come from, the power, etcetera? And then what work do I do? And am I a contractor to a different network state? Is is my is my network state have members who are there for solidaristic reasons, like being keto or or vegan or whatever? Like, it starts to get a little shaky when you try to look at imports and exports. So I don't know if that that's helpful. I I have my imagination is a little different. It's one where, back to the, microservices analogy, any any particular, let's call it subset like, unit of of, unit of solidarity needs to be able to consider both its internal needs and its its external, its external needs or its relations amongst itself and its relationships with others. And that even insofar as we do produce these communities of of of solidarity, we need not, situate each individual in exactly one because I could, for example, be a member of a solidaristic unit that's, I don't know, associated with my particular religious beliefs or my my dietary preferences, etcetera, or both, and also also be in the constituency of, of let's say call it a nation instead of a state that's focused on engineering. I like to talk a lot about the social institution of engineering. I feel a deep attachment to this lineage of engineers as stewards of technology for the betterment of society. I mean, my my dad's a civil engineer. My uncle's an architect. My grandfather's a structural engineer. And so, like, I come from a family that sort of gave me that association, and then my formal education is four engineering degrees. And so I am pretty So you're part of the engineering nation. Quite literally part of like, but but I actually that that's not a joke. Like, I feel very strong scent of set of attachment to a set of Engineering nationalists, you are. Of of ideas. And and I can but that one, I can provide as a service. Right? Even if I'm also part of these other other segments that are, you know, more belief oriented or, you know, get religious or dietary or I'm also part of the ultimate Frisbee nation. I played ultimate Frisbee for a decade. But, like, only the engineering one is actually an export where I I'm, like, delivering value and then hopefully importing value to meet my needs.
Yeah. I think so. I have a I have a few, questions here. Because on the one hand, like, it feels that the way in which, you're describing things right now is that, whatever is these new creatures that, that we're trying to elaborate, conceptually is kind of like you're it looks like you're, you're applying some kind of functional approach, rather than Balaji's actual territorial approach to the network state. And, so you you you might have different people that aggregate around a particular function, and then they might become this kind of, like, digital digital guild or something. I'm wondering whether even that is is, like, not too functionally oriented, because in some way, like, you know, I I think we are all part of many types. We can call them as we like, but, like, communities and things like that, digital or local communities. And it's not really like I actually don't really have an interest in being part of a tribe in which we are all, you know, engineers or all artists. It's actually there is it's more, for me, it's more like this shared vision of society. And, and it's the more varied it's in fact the the people and the functions and the and their passions and their job whatever, the more varied those are the more interesting this community gets, but we are all aligned together because we have a particular commonality in the vision of how we want society to be. Perhaps we also want to engage into some type of collective action around a particular societal issue. Perhaps we want to share resources in common. But I almost think that just like I believe that the Balaji's, geographical and mono monothematic notion of network state is is lacking this concept of interdependencies and things like that. I feel like the functional approach is, clearly way more interesting than, than Balaji's approach. But it it it might also lack a little bit of what we might consider that what we want to qualify as a nation. To me, this is more like this is a guild, this is like, this is a a community of people that are doing a particular things and maybe they need to, like, cooperate and and collaborate between each other. But but when we're talking about, like, coordination, coordination, I don't know what the name of those things is, it's like, don't we actually, like, what is the the line of discernment that, make it wants to be part of the same measure?
So so let me let me make, an additional clarification. So we were focused on these type of breakdowns that, we just discussed because we're kind of building from Balaji's ontology. But let's, like, let's break that for a second and just give give away Balaji, and let's talk about somebody like, sort of, Stafford Beer has this quote. All systems are simultaneously decentralized and centralized just in different dimensions. I butchered it. You can look it up exactly. But in a sense, when we say that it's both centralized and decentralized at the same time and it's a question of what dimensions, we're just asking, like, where are the variations and where are the similarities? So if we wanna align a bunch of people, artists and engineers and, you know, whatever, like, all different kinds of people who do different kinds of things have different backgrounds, they're extremely diverse around a set of, let's say, preferences about, you know, how, you know, how what what we value and what kind of change we wanna see in the world. That's centralizing around a set of, let's say, I I ideological or, like, formative precepts that we would work against, an animating purpose, if you will. And then there's a lot of variety in the the constituents in many ways. But, alternatively, we could take, again, I'll take, like, an an engineering, organization which could contain a bunch of people who have very similar skills, but maybe they have very different political leanings and preferences. And so there's, like, a there's a slice that is aligned in one dimension and misaligned in others. And when I think about the fabric of society, it's like all of these different slices in lots of different directions. They're not orthogonal. They're intersecting and thus meaningfully entangled, might have a non trivial topology, but but but ultimately, it's not as simple as just slicing things into functions or slicing them into political slices or slicing them by any dimension.
Yeah. It reminds me of, like, a almost like a market segmentation. Like, it's something that you would do in, like, market research for trying to develop a product, like a technological product,
viewing it in that way. It's very much a maps and territories problem. You're mistaking the map for the territory. The territory is this rich, entangled organic thing, and then we impose a map on it that slices it up into nice clean grid lines, and then we talk about the map. As long as we remember that we can have lots of different maps, they're all different projections of the same rich territory, then it's fine to use the maps. Just we should be careful about substituting the map for the territory.
Right. So moving to this, question about infrastructure again. I'm interested if you have any thoughts because you're taking this more, I guess, functional approach, how do you think a something like a coordination or a combination or, you know, whatever, like, new meme we want to create for our alternative to the network state, how should it, or how could it handle, infrastructure in a way that is not, sort of, in the way that, sort of, nation states handle infrastructure today?
Yeah. So I guess the first question is, actually, what functions should your coordination provide you? Like, is the coordination ontology rich enough to be the, I guess you could call it the the source of an anti state socialism instead of a state socialism, in which case we would have to articulate all of the functions that society serves its members and then ask if there is a way to provision them all using, this coordination, model. And I would say that that's actually probably plausible, but it's a pretty big step change in the way that society works. So maybe a more stepwise approach would be to just identify, excuse me, would be to identify specific functions and then asking what it would look like for, a coordination to service them. And for me, if I talk about social infrastructures, these are the ones that, are the most underserved in Balaji's ontology. So, for example, like infrastructures of care. I said earlier, I moved home after my daughter was born or moved back to where I grew up. Why? Because there is a social infrastructure present. My sister, my parents, friends I've known since high school who also have kids. And so, there was an extent to which living anywhere else failed to afford me a particular social infrastructure that was required for raising a family. Things like, Hey, oh no, I had this big client deliverable come up. I'm gonna have to work late tonight. Can you watch my daughter? Well, sure. There's a market solution. I could look up care.com and get a random stranger honestly, but it's a strictly inferior good because with regards to care of my daughter, a market solution is inferior by definition. And so like, you know, reasoning about these more informal institutions and the extent to which they fulfill, functions in society that I rely upon, is pretty interesting. If we start to think about those as, things that get fulfilled by social infrastructures, we can start to extrapolate learnings from these technical infrastructures into the extent to which they're, operated, maintained, governed, cared for, that they provide for functions that people need in their lives to, something more like the social dimension. Again, I think that we need some geographic locality and I'm not the first person to bring up the idea of a local first, coordination as the anchor for anybody who has real life entanglements and then my a geographic coordinations have things in common like, you know, Medigov which is an organization I'm involved with, with P which is a rich network of people with with some similar research interests and, you know, building stuff and learning, very much I feel that as a as a, we could call it an infrastructure for my for my research interests and for my, sort of some of my professional work, but it's fundamentally distinct from the set of infrastructures that are geographic in nature that that serve my my physical needs and sort of the needs of my family.
Yeah. I think you're saying something that, I really like to hear, which is, like, to me, like, the the important question that need needs to be tackled, when we're discussing about those new those new entities, is, like, why why are they needed and what is it that currently is not satisfying not satisfying us? Why why is there this resonance? And I think there are two degrees. There is, on one hand, the fact that the existing forms of institutions are perhaps over, over colonizing, taking too much space and preventing people from doing some things. And then the opposite side is, they are actually not providing enough of what we want. And I think Balaji is probably about they are taking too much space, and, I think we might be more on the direction of, like, there is actually quite a gap. And I think what is interesting is that there is clearly a gap, where the state is not providing and the market is not providing. Or or maybe they are providing, but they are not providing the most effective or in the most optimal way. And, and I think that's where it makes sense to intervene and propose something new, which is not in the sense of, hey. I don't like what you're doing state. Let me move away, and then I'll have to do everything again. And it's gonna be just as lame as what the current state is doing, if not was, because I actually have to redo it. It's it's about, like, hey. Let's actually recognize what the state is providing, and let's recognize what the market is providing. And those are two very powerful institution that we should also respect for the things that are provide to us. But there is also a gap. There is, like, we believe, I think, that there is many things that could be done in a better manner, in a more enjoyable manner, in a more collective manner, if we were not relying exclusively on the public infrastructure of the state and are on the private infrastructure of the market. And I think that's where this this idea of coordination, combination comes about where there is actually more value, as you say, when you have people from your tribes that are taking care of your kid rather than purchasing the service of a nanny that that you don't really have a relationship with. And and and to me, this is kind of this this particular gap that, that justifies at least this, this time to elaborate something else. And in this sense, it's very different from, I think, the underlying motivation of Balaji's with the network state, which is more, let's escape from the constraints that existing state infrastructure are providing. So this third sector
go ahead. Sorry. Well, so this this sort of Sorry.
Yeah. Just just to finish. Pico, please. Saying, like, because I think because we are seeing this as a gap as opposed to as a need to escape, then it makes much more sense that we want to build upon it and in a interdependent manner because, actually, there are some things that are already provided by the state in the market. Let's add to them, and let's fill up this gap that we are filling and that we believe we can fill up with collaborative collective action from this combination.
Yeah. I I'm a 100% on board. We're also not the first people to discuss this, and I'm sure you're not surprised. I a friend of mine, Sarah Horowitz, recently wrote a book called Mutualism. It's, similarly articulating this gap. And I think one of the things that really stands out about discussing this gap is that, both the state and the market are extremely impersonal institutions. They operate at scale. In fact, they they even you could say that a modern society fetishizes scale. You're not successful until the thing you've made is scaled. And the truth is that when you're dealing with some of this more, let's say, family related stuff, like scale is not an attribute you want. You want personalness. You want relationships. You want things that by definition do not scale. And so in this third sector, in the, the part of the economy that is just more personal in nature, it it's by definition, it's your, you know, local community, it's your family, it's the people that you have relationships with or, you know, maybe two hop relations where there's still a much tighter knitness. I kind of associate this with the the sector of the economy that that Putnam talks about declining in bowling alone. It's like there's this this thing that happened in the last century where we got sort of fixated on these scalable institutions and that we sort of lost this, sort of, let's say evaluation of these more personal, more local institutions. And so I view DAOs, this coordination thing, Sarah's work on the Mutualist Society and every other manifestation of this as this deep need for humans to have personal relationships and community groups with whom they have non scalable relationships. And that when we build new infrastructures, we should be building them such that they support these kinds of more localized, more personal relationships and not simply assume that things are good if and only if they are extremely scalable. Moving away from maximal efficiency towards sufficiency and then allowing the the details, the variations to proliferate and just have a generally more biodiverse institutional fabric will lead to a a richer set of choices for everyone and thus, ideally, more fulfilling lives for people.
Yeah. Absolutely. And I think it's, it's also related with, like, technology in the sense that, all of student, these type of collective, communities, whatnot, we actually now have the value the ability not necessarily to scale in terms of size, but to scale in in terms of reach and really finding the people that we we want to support and the people that want to support us. And and and therefore, like, increasing the capacity of action and collective action that those, those community can have while, of course, the Internet is also improving this the the capacity of the market and of the state. And so in some ways, like, there there needs to be now this very interesting, window of opportunity to try and sneak in, and try to provide those, alternative solutions to things that could very well indeed, be responded to from a public or a private perspective, but maybe they don't have the same quality in terms of, they are less aligned and they they have less of these, social, social value that comes when you're actually doing things together with the people from your same tribe.
Yeah. And then so I would say that we have these sort of three big lanes or three big sectors. One's public. One's basically private, the the market. The then the other is civic. It's sort of it's it's neither public nor private. It's kind of both. It's sort of, you know, these these localized, you know, subsidiary units that are they share dimensions of solidarity and they they they allow people to be expressive. While the market and the state may provide many of the functions needed by individuals, just sort of like reclaiming the space for self actualization not just at the individual level but at the small group or community level. But here's the thing, we're talking about the network state being really, exciting for people because it's an articulation of a new ontology and it sounds implementable. So we're we're back to like technologies and building infrastructures to support things. And so at least from my part, and we talked about this a little bit the time that I went on an interview with with with, this podcast before, is design, and design entrenches ontologies. And so if you take the network state and you build the infrastructures that embody it, you're going to get things that have that network state ontology, Balaji's ontology. So if we want a coordination ontology or a, you know, a civic sector that's both, sufficient in the sense that the needs of people are met and expressive in the sense that it provides them the affordances to discover what value is for them locally amongst their shared tribe members or their members of their community of solidarity, then we need to have that ontology fleshed out enough that we can actually build infrastructures to entrench that one instead because this is where like the politics of infrastructure comes from. You embody in the infrastructure some model of the world. And if you're not really careful about what that model of the world is, you're effectively, you know, imprinting it. And maybe you could say that if you're a, you know, a dictator or a would be, you know, sort of founder in the model that Balaji puts forth, you get to be this like local dictator of your own little universe and then you just try to attract people to your little dictatorship. In my ontology, that sort of dictatorship role is something we want to diffuse away. The role of the founder in in the creation of the of the new, of a new element or a new group is not to tell everyone what to do, it's to sort of discover the ontology, to encode it, and to build an infrastructure or a set of tools that enable a set of activities but it's a service act, not a, not one of control. But that's a nuance because whenever we look at, whenever we look at infrastructures, there's simultaneously technologies that empower and control. There's no like strict line that you can place in the sand. You are adding constraints and you are creating opportunities. And exactly how you make your discretionary choices is something that is often down to context. And the same decision in one context might be viewed as an imposition, an active control and in other context, it might be, you know, helpful in enabling. And I don't think that you can pull that question out and say, It's always okay to, you know, do this and not that. It's a sort of no free lunch scenario which is part of the reason why it's inconvenient for a manifesto like Balaji's work where they want the one commandment and you need the right answer. And, bluntly, I I don't think the real world works like that.
Yeah. And, it's also, it's also very interesting because there is a lot of those, sci fi, hyper libertarian, utopian or dystopian stories, right, where you have, like, every every community or every whatever you wanna call it network state and whatnot. They have their own infrastructure, and then all of a sudden you have, like, 10 different roads because everyone is using the only the one, and they don't share with other. Right? And so, like, in some way, like, if you think really in the sense of the network state as something that should build all the stack of infrastructure from from physical infrastructure to to social infrastructure, whatever, you just get the most incredible amount of redundancy and it is becomes ridiculous. And therefore, of course, the the necessity, especially because we live in, like, because we want to live in a world that is not everyone is being secluded in their own little territory. There is this need of understanding the the common infrastructure, which is shared potentially amongst multiple nation, multiple community, multiple, whatever is our name. And, and, and this is, this is fundamental because these also brings about the one thing that Balaji is trying to avoid at all costs, which is, well, if we do have common infrastructure, we also have to manage this common infrastructure as a common between different communities, which might not actually have similar ideas and philosophy, and yet stay on the same location and therefore they need to use the same road or the same bridge. And so politics comes again, right? Like as soon as we we realize the need and the and the it's not a need, it's actually of the preference because we don't wanna waste resources by building 10 times the same infrastructure, then then politics come about by their own definition because the commons and the commons management of public and our private infrastructure becomes necessary to find a point of agreement between people that might not fully agree on everything.
But there's a logical trap in his argument, which is just that, like, he supposes that if you sufficiently aligned people, they wouldn't find something to argue about. But to me, that's a sheer, like, lack of experience with humans. Like, if you're not in a dictatorial environment where someone just gets to say so, immediately there's disagreements. In fact, I would argue even in an environment where I'm, like, the the CEO, I actually benefit from creating the space for people to disagree because there's a lot of information in the disagreements. So, again, we're talking about this very sterilized reductive model of the world that is so far away from the world that actually trying to build something as if the world worked like that, like, that bridge falls down. If you don't survey the shores the bridge is gonna be connected to and understand the actual depth of the depth of the water and the materials on the cliff face, etcetera, and then you go try to build a bridge, it doesn't stand up. And so, like, the story, it's very truthy. It appeals to people's, like, desire for all of their needs to be met beautifully and to not have to argue with anyone about anything ever. But, like, it's just not a thing. I wanted to figure out the real thing that that shares some of that truthiness. Not all of it, but like the and truthiness, by the way, is this term for sounds true, feels true. Isn't true, just gives you the sense it's appealing. You, like, want it to be true. And so I think that we see a lot of sort of manifesto writing narrative sort of futuring activities. They reside soundly in the feels true, but is false. Because the real stuff, it's usually a bit more complex, interconnected, less sterile. It's harder to articulate. It's harder to scale back to that scale fetishization. Is that if you reduce something enough, you can get lots of people to resonate with it. It's just not real. If you try to face the realities, then you're gonna get something that's naturally a little less legible, naturally a little more local, and thus less scalable. And so I think there's a tension here in just the very idea that, like, we could come up with an I a meme, an alternative meme that is, competitive with the network state because the network state has already been optimized for a certain kind of receptivity, but it's just not been optimized for reality. So we're, at least in my opinion, we're broaching this trade off space and saying, like, okay, but, like, we're gonna sacrifice a little bit on the on the raw mimetics in favor for, like, realness. And then maybe on a longer time scale, it has stronger memetics because it could entran like, it could actually be implemented, and people could have firsthand experiences of these outcomes. And and to some extent, already do. My view on a lot of the the communities that I participate in is that they have a lot more in common with the coordination idea than they do with the network state idea, in a large part because they exist.
But, Zagya, I'm just I think I might steal that too. Just by curiosity. Optimizing for reality.
What is, so let's, let's let's forget the implementation, details slash impossibilities. Just to understand from your perspective, what is the things out of the current mean of the network state as described by Balaji? So what are those components independently of whether or not they are real, meaning whether or not they can be, manifested in reality, but even only at the conceptual and, yeah, at the conceptual layer. Like, what are the things that you do resonate with, and what are the things that you do not resonate with, independently of possible?
Sure. So, I mean, firstly, just the idea of these communities of solidarity is resonant for me, but what's not resonant for me is having to pick what. So there's, like, a very stark difference between an intersectionality where I am, you know, many things at once. I'm, you know, a son and a father and a, you know, a brother and whatnot. So I have my familial relations. I and then I I am also a member of a physical constituency where where I live now, and I've, you know, made an effort to, you know, like, pay school taxes, and I'm starting to be entangled within my my local geographic element. I'm a member of, I guess I could go on at the set length. You we've discussed it already. Very much the the communities of solidarity and being able to define myself in terms of memberships, but 100 many memberships in parallel that serve different aspects of my reality rather than having to pick one dimension, which is somehow magically going to serve all aspects of my needs. I would say that's the probably the most pointed one. Otherwise, I I don't know, man. I'm a founder, so I can sort of resonate with the idea of, like, building something and kinda having, quote unquote, control in that regime. But my experience with building block science is sort of opposite. It's that, like, I am most successful when I when I relinquish control. I I've worked very hard to create redundancies over myself and to train and educate other people and to create information processing capabilities even within the organization that, support dissent and turn that dissent into information. And so I I just don't see the I don't see the benefit of these kind of, feudal archetypes. I I I'm much more into cooperatives and and models of human organization that close the loops between those who make decisions and those who are affected by decisions. I I'm not advocating for, like, perfect nonhierarchy. I think you need expertise. And in fact, our discussion of technical infrastructures reminds us that we are dependent on a relatively large number of, you know, individuals and organizations that are technically expert in fulfilling technical needs. And so we wouldn't flatten that away. We would just, we would just factor it apart. We could say that I don't need to trust a specific person. I can trust an institution. That institution fulfills a function. And my main complaint with the modern society is that we have lots of nonfunctional institutions. Like, I'd be happy to see institutions that are incapable of fulfilling their, you know, animating purpose fade away, whereas I'd be more than happy to put funding and effort behind, organizations that have animating purposes that fulfill societal functions and even invest more in them. You know, improving maintenance of of roads and bridges, at least here in The US, would be a good investment. But on the other hand, I I I struggle to see, for example, the SEC as fulfilling its purpose of protecting investors. It does largely seems to be, an organization who's trying to grow their power base rather than trying to serve their, their function as a protector of investors, which is an important function. And I don't think the function should go away. I'm just questioning whether the institution responsible for that function is actually actually acting according to that function, which sort of brings us back to another nice Stafford Beer quote, which is something along the lines of the purpose of a system is what it does, which is a kind of tongue in cheek jab at systems that claim to be doing one thing. But if you actually look at the empirical evidence that, you know, what they're actually doing in the world is quite different from their stated purpose. And so it's tricky, this whole functional decomposition approach just asks this question. What what functions are sufficient for a healthy society and what infrastructures and institutions serve those needs and that, you know, my view of a of a a healthy future society is one where we've identified those things and that we have tried to make sure that everyone receives them. I sometimes call this universal basic affordances, you know, insofar as we can limit the extent to which people need to, or, like, essentially are denied those affordances, but then ultimately leave space for a high degree of self actualization both at the individual level, but at the group but also at the group level. And it's this, you know, coordination or commutation that could serve as the franchisable unit of these communities of solidarity, which could be, you know, small, medium, large, depends on whether they're local and physical space or they're digital. But ultimately, by creating space for more personal institutions for things that don't have to be scaled, I think we'll just get a much richer institutional fabric, much, better provisioning of social senior social functions, and, you know, maybe just like foregoing some of this desire to, a, scale and to, b, to disentangle. Because, again, the sterilization comes from an unwillingness to engage with, these sometimes stressful, but but ultimately life processes of, you know, debating, deliberating, arguing, discussing, deciding how to share resources. But, like, I mean, even nature does a reasonably good job, you know, managing the flow of nonfungible resources, you know, nutrients and stuff. You can look at, you know, matter and energy flowing around in natural ecologies. And, you know, those systems, whether you think about it this way or not, they do effectively coordinate or share resources. Maybe not necessarily in purely collaborative ways, but it's a mix of, you know, cooperative and competitive dynamics. And in a way, the state and the market provide us some substrates for cooperative and, competitive dynamics at scale but then the piece that's just missing is the is the the more personal less scaled dimension, the civic sector, this third sector. So, yeah, my hope is that, our our efforts to provide an alternative ontology are just going to, surface and support this third sector and and make sure that, people's needs are actually being met, not just, like, wiped aside because they're not scalable.
Yeah. I think one of the what I'm sort of getting from this is that, sort of I think the market and the state, but I would probably argue the market even more so, optimizes for what you said scale, efficiency, and probably convenience, in certain respects. Also in inconvenience in in other respects as well. But like in in a capitalist system where, like, these things are being optimized for and, therefore needing to be scale, it creates these situations where people feel very alienated and where they have been sort of, like, untethered from, I think what you mentioned previously, where in past decades, we would have been, you know, members of these types of organizations or groups of this third sector that don't scale or aren't meant to scale in the same way that, maybe markets or the state do. And so maybe I was thinking of, like, the network state, this idea of, one commandment as being like this community of solidarity. For someone who is very alienated within the system, maybe that sounds very that sounds very nice because then, that's maybe like the first time that they're actually brought to, like, the reality that, they would like to be with other people who think like them. They're just thinking about it. It's just done in a way that is, like, very, surface level, I guess.
A machine learning analogy here is just dimensionality reduction. Right? We have a big complex world. We're dealing with all of these dynamics. They're illegible, and they seem to be out of our control, and our knee jerk reaction is to sterilize it down to one d. And you're like, okay. Cool. I mean, like, I get why that's desirable. But, ultimately, you know, if you lived in, you know, one d is even less than Flatland is two d. Like, imagine living in Flatland. Like, you really don't have any space left to to to express yourself or you can't encounter people who are differentiated from you because it's so low dimensional. And so what we're really hopefully giving people is a choose your own basis functions. Look, it's not one commandment, but here are all, excuse me, all of these different, you know, dimensions that are in the world and I'm gonna pick five or 10 or 15, and I'm gonna engage with those and they're gonna be legible, And I'm gonna understand how they relate to me and my family and my friends. And I can make sense of the world in, you know, again, 10 dimensions, but, like, you know, like 10 commandments, 10 dimensions. Right? Not like crazy out of out out, you know, out of this world stuff. People can man can handle that. And so it's just a bit like unbundling it. It's not like, okay. I select, you know, you know, a Hebrew style religion, and I get my 10 commandments, and these are the these are the commandments for everyone who who comes from this particular tradition. It's more like, okay, well, I'm gonna have my own 10 where one of them comes from each of the communities of solidarity that I've opted into and if that's a sufficient set of of communities to meet my needs, then I've reduced the complexity of my world to engaging with this, you know, order 10, systems. But even though systems are unlikely to be truly reducible down to one dimension, but but you kinda get the idea. It's like a local approximation thing. It's just that everybody's local approximation needs to be local to them. You can't have the local approximation be copy pasted across people who are not the same. Like, if the people are differentiated, their local neighborhood in this universe will be different, but they'll be able to interact with people who share dimensions of solidarity, whether it's physical location, dependence on the same physical infrastructure that comes with that shared location, whether it's familial bonds, whether it's, you know, technical or labor oriented, bonds. We work together on something. There's a variety of different flavors of of relationships that people might have, but I I'm ultimately advocating for, trying to reduce the complexity of the environment for people and to give them more control over where they express their their diversity. And then where also appropriate, kind of compressing out of view the stuff that, that they that that they're not interested in or don't need to contend with. But that doesn't mean that, like, their network state is doing it for them. It might just mean, as is today, like, there's a New York State Department of Transportation making sure that I have safe and reliable roads. Like, is that there's actually nothing wrong with that. That's very reasonable. I have effectively delegated my concern for the safety of the roads to them. And if I really have an issue, there's some communication channel somewhere through a public engagement office where I can say, hey, like this is a problem. Someone should look at it. And then someone who's reasonably qualified to look into it can and ultimately, I'm not qualified to make that distinction anyway. I'm only really qualified to surface the surface the issue, but this ultimately relies on a, you know, an engineering institution as public service model because if the engineering public, you know, network state that's responsible for this is dictator and is not necessarily interested in my well-being, then they're just gonna make cheap roads and bridges, and they're gonna fall down sometime, and they're gonna write that risk off on their actuarial tables. They're not going to actually care, about the effects of their technical decisions on the people who are affected in any way other than some, you know, monetary or power measurement.
Right. I think, there's, like, I mean, there's a question of, like, efficiency, but, like, efficiency for whom? And then, also, like, that sometimes something that is efficient in certain aspects is still insufficient in meeting people's needs. And, yeah, I think sometimes there's like this, people have, have drank the Kool Aid of, of of the ideology of today to think that always efficiency is a good thing. But one of the things that I think that I really liked that you said was about thinking about sufficiency, and away from
efficiency. Yeah. And so these concepts are actually quite formal. So even for people who really like formal, technical, quantitative stuff, when we talk about optimization problems, all optimization problems, they have an objective, and they have constraints. That's the the construct. The objective is the thing that you sort of say maximize for, and the constraints are, like, requirements you need to meet. So all viable solutions or all feasible solutions satisfy the constraints. And so when we talk about efficiency, we're usually talking about improving the objective function. We're not necessarily talking about the satisfaction of the constraints. And in fact, we tend to push on the constraints and try to widen them out and make them more inclusive precisely because the more constrained the constraints are, the worse the objective function ends up being. This is, like, one of the main theorems in optimization theory. And what I'm sort of getting at here is that as long as we are optimizing rather than satisfying, we are going to be imposing a belief about what value is upon the system that we're optimizing and that we can sort of relax that a little bit and move towards what are called constraint satisfaction problems, which identify these requirements or the things that are necessary and strive to meet them without being quite so forward about, you know, improving the the the optimization objective because we should would recognize the objective as being ultimately a subjective choice and that you might have a wide range of people reasoning with different objectives in mind. And if you go back and look at someone like Rawls and his social choice theory, he's actually using some of these same mathematical constructions. He talks about, like, sort of maximizing the minimum of a utility function where a group of people have different utilities. And the and the reason that comes up is because even if you think you know people's utilities, you don't really. In fact, most people don't know their own utilities. So far be it from an economist to be able to claim that they know everyone's utilities. And these more expressive systems, they they let go of this presumption that we can know what utility is and focus on, on meeting sufficiencies. And then, you know, any particular local neighborhood can optimize for something. I'm not saying tech startups shouldn't optimize for revenue. I'm saying we shouldn't model everything after tech startups. Like, they're gonna behave. They're a species, and they're not a bad species. They're just one species. And our institutional ecology needs to be a lot more diverse.
Yes. Definitely.
Yeah. I think there's also a thing about, like, to which extent is it really efficient? Because I think like even from my like beyond the fact that efficiency might come at the cost of effectiveness or however it's called but, there is also I think quite an argument that a complete, disconnection and lack of interdependence is actually extremely inefficient because all of Sudan you need to you need to rebuild the reframe from scratch, like everyone like, there is no specialization possible, you cannot leverage on the work of author. So in fact, there is quite many efficiency that can be earned from putting things in commons and, and accepting and actually embracing interdependencies for the sake of efficiency and, possibly, also for the sake of efficacy, when well done. So it's like it not only it's it's an argument that is only half an argument because it's not looking at the actual satisfaction condition, but I think it's even the argument of efficiency is not a very strong argument
in this context. You have to draw a dotted line boundary about the system that you have in consideration. So whenever you're, like, analyzing or engineering quota system, you define both, like, the functions that is that that make it up and the boundaries of it to other systems. And so you're describing a situation where we move the the dotted line boundary from an individual network state, which is trying to, let's say, efficiently serve all of its necessary functions or we could open the boundary up to involve a variety of network states and the relationships amongst them such that they could share resources or share functions. The existing society works kinda like that. Right? We have, let's say, a, I'll go back to transportation system. So in the state of New York, there's a transportation bureau that serves the whole state, but there's also a bunch of municipalities, counties, etcetera, that are individually provisioning some of their local roads. And to some extent, the road system at the state level is coordinated amongst the local jurisdictions by the state level organization, and then you can recurse up to The United States. And it has a federal transportation department, and that helps coordinate the interactions of the, the transportation systems, you know, amongst the states. And then if you really wanna open it up, you can look at the, you know, the kinds of institutions that manage things like air traffic control and look at the way that international flights are regulated. And what you're actually just gonna find is a big messy web of partially overlapping transportation network that allows me to hop on a flight and come visit you in France without really thinking about it twice.
Is there anything left that you want to mention, since we reached about an hour? I just wanna check, that you really wanted to talk about.
I feel like we've hit the big bullet items. There's some stuff that I think will be really important for you guys to discuss, but, that's coming up, I think, in the future, the the discussion of personal versus impersonal institutions and the extent to which they're complementary to each other. But I I I defer that topic to Eric because it's really his area of expertise, not mine.
Okay. Is there any, last things for you that you want to touch upon?
No. I think, I I think this was quite of, interesting discussion. To to me, like, if I if I try to dissect, the the interesting some of the conclusion that we can use to build upon is, the extent to which the the ideal, the ideal whether or not you might agree with now, but the ideal of creating, a system that is a standalone system, because of the exit, has some kind of beyond whether or not this is desirable for everyone, or for anyone, but, it also has this inherent, not conflict, but this inherent cost of not being able to benefit from the collective, management of infrastructure. And and so if you do want to exit because you actually resonate with this ideal of I don't wanna be associated with people that don't fully agree with me, then then you have to incur this very additional cost of well, then you have to deal with everything on your own as well and all the benefits of well, you you might you might escape from the cost of interdependence. You are also escaping from the benefit of interdependencies. And I think this is kind of like a balance to be struck is, like, to which extent are the the the benefit of interdependence if properly managed and properly coordinated, not obviously superior than the cost that might come with it. And and, again, I think, like, by just moving away, that's that's the easy solution. No more cost, but, but also no more benefits. So great. Easier question. And how do we actually structure this combination or coordination in such a way that we maximize the benefits while reducing the cost of this this type of interdependencies?
So I'm gonna end then by kind of summarizing what I think is the is the preliminary answer to your question. First is that we we we evoke the term network in the title, network state. However, if I throw away state for a moment and just focus on network, a network has a, a local neighborhood. It's nodes with edges. And there's ideally, with a nice rich network, there's a non trivial difference between any given node's neighborhood. Like, it's got different edges in it. And so when we go to the really sterile extreme, what we're effectively doing is trying to cut out a node and making it totally self contained. So it's not, it's not getting served and not serving any other nodes. In the other extreme, we have a what I'll call, an overly dense network, a network that is so dense that the both at the institutional and individual level, it's just cognitive overload. I have so many edges. We've passed my Dunbar's number or my organizations are trying to manage far too many relations. And I think some of this is just the modern world rapidly digitizing and the creation of all of these new tools, widgets, things that are just demanding our attention. They want to be used. They want to be governed. They want to be interacted with. They're not infrastructures because they're not invisible. They're in up in our face. And so when we get this overload of interactions with with people and objects and institutions, we're retreating to the other extreme. But in the middle is the actual thing, network, which has got these local, neighborhoods. And so what I am imagining is a new ontology that is actually networked in the sense that it has, local nodes where an individual or an individual, community could be a node, and that the extent to which that community has relations, whether it's co membership or shared resources with other communities, you get an edge. And simply reimagining the world with a a kind of proper network ontology and the understanding that the size of a neighborhood needs to remain bounded even if it's not, you know, zero or one, leads us to a a view of the world that we could we could build towards, that we could, like, practically embody by building these supporting infrastructures for these coordinations or these units of solidarity, like, enabling them to constitute and interoperate. So so not just constitute and operate individually, but constitute and and interoperate. And just to be clear, I don't necessarily mean constitute in terms of write a formal, constitution. I mean, in the sense of, you know, create and maintain boundaries. So, like, the like, constitution, like, of your body. Like, it's embodied. They can come to be recognizable as a thing. And that that could be something as simple as, you know, your bowling league. Right? You don't necessarily need to form an LLC or launch a DAO to form a a group of friends that, you know, competes at bowling every Tuesday for, you know, whatever six months and then maybe disperses and does the next thing.
Yeah. Absolutely. And I think what's interesting in this, framework is that we are already whatever the name of this thing is, it's already here. It's just unnamed and there is just many different instances, and we don't recognize them as being part of the same constellation of units. And, therefore, we don't even think that they can be networked together. And I think if we manage to find this right meme and, and all of Sudan shed light on the fact that those are things that have been happening since ever and continue to happen despite the invisibility because of lack of a vocabulary. And then the the performativity of the language, which all of Sudan because now we we perceive those things as being part of nodes of a potential broader network, we can choose to which extent do we want to connect or disconnect with those specific units.
And this is actually why I felt like I really wanted to come here and talk to you guys is because I view the performity of performativity of language as being central here and that the network state book is sort of jumping out and trying to, invite a particular future with a particular choice of words and and an ontology. And resistant to the what was articulated, and I wanted to work with you guys to sort of tease out what that, what that alternative would be. But to your point, p, it's I think it comes down to finding the right words to make visible, to make legible what I see as the reincarnation of the civic center excuse me, the civic sector in technological, like, forms. So, like, the technology and the Internet period has given us a new set of tools, a new set of materials. And what I see is people using those tools and materials to, to to rearticulate or to reimagine what the civic sector can and should be, this thing that is not the state and is not the market.
Right. And I think we need to move away from this, this vision that, like, digital communities are blank social networks, which do not have this collective action, which don't have this collective resources and so forth and really, like, try to reformalize, what does an actual digital community looks like. And that clearly does not look like a Facebook group or a Twitter thread. And and and I think that and once we've once we formalize this, I think automatically the tools for actually improving the management of those digital communities will add to that. We can't exclude from our ontology
geographically local communities. So for me, the Absolutely. Those big misses on Balaji's part was a a failure to understand the the relationship to the the physical local. And so when we build this new ontology, it needs to be able to bring both these sort of digital collective action things. And so these communities of solidarity that are cross cutting and these ones that are locally anchored, they need to be they need to be in the same ontology. They need I need to be part of both at the same time and have one thing serve one set of needs while the other serves another set of needs. And, again, for me, that's very much my experience of, you know, coming home with my family and starting to reintegrate with my local social infrastructures while maintaining and even expanding my relationships in my digital first professional relationships.
And and and, to to the defense of Balaji, I'm surprised. I'm intervening in that sense. But to the defense of Balaji, actually because he's he's actually talking in in some way, is he is he thinking about the the local because he actually wants to purchase the return and declare independence so that we can all live together, which to his defense, that's interesting. We need to think about the local. And I think some of the mistakes that a lot of, you know, digital community, global global community, this course actually forget is the is the local aspect of of those. And and so, you know, you you you you can be part of millions of digital community but you forget that there is also the local bonds and the local infrastructure. And and I think to to to to respond to what you're saying about it's need needs to be part of the same ontology. To me, it's very it's very simply that whatever is the combination, if we wanna call it like this, there is one that you just cannot extrapolate yourself away from, which is your locally like, if we if we consider combination as bonds and and relationality between people that have a similar interest of something in common, then there is one of those which you do have you cannot escape it. You have something in common. You're on the same physical space. And that's just the nature of the relationship is physicality as opposed to ideology, as opposed to solidarity and so forth. And we cannot forget about that one. And this is kind of the one that no matter what, you have no choice. Well, you have the choice to move somewhere else. But no matter what, you will have a community
of relations that are based on who has chosen to live next to you. Yeah. So what's interesting about this is that there's actually a relatively clean way to align this, and it's simply attention. So when we when you're in physical space with someone and you're paying attention to something else, they'll say you're off in the clouds or, oh, he's not here. Right? Because what they're actually talking about when we say you're here is that your attention is localized with the other people who are physically present with you. You're working together on a thing. You're conversing. You're sharing a meal or whatever it is that you're doing in physical space. And even in digital space, sure, you can have a 100 tabs open, but you can only pay attention to so much at once. And so I think there's something really salient to thinking about both digital and physical, you know, communities of solidarity or groupings in terms of co locating attention. And then I can even reason about whether I'm, you know, online doing a podcast with you guys versus going upstairs and, you you know, giving my daughter lunch. Like, I'm taking my attention, and I'm moving it between allocations to my, you know, digital coordination that's interested in coordination and my physical sort of familial localized unit, both of which are obligations that I feel to my, you know, to my communities, to my to the these parts of my identity. And I don't need to, like, segment them harshly. I can just say, well, these are these share this local constrained resource my attention, and I'm gonna make decisions about how I partition that attention across these, these dimensions.
Nice. Yeah. Even though I was, a little bit offended when you mentioned people having hundreds of tabs open, if you took it personally, Now looking at my browser with hundreds of tabs open. I really enjoyed the conversation. Talked to you, Zargam. Maybe if we can just, to end it off, if you wanted to leave us, any last thoughts, of course, and where people can keep up with you and your work.
I guess final thoughts is thanks for for listening to my thoughts. You can keep up with me. I'm m zargam on Twitter, and I have the Block Science blog, which is both on Medium and on, we we put a ghost blog up to sort of, you know, disintermediate, but we keep going to the medium, which just goes to tell you that convenience seems to dominate. But, yeah, those are probably the two best places to keep up.
Alright. Great. Thanks so much.
Thank you, Zagun.