Three Things #39: October 16, 2022
To state or not to state 🤷
I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the idea of the state as something sacrosanct and ineffable: the idea that the state is the root of authority and legitimacy, and is not to be questioned. That the state has a monopoly on violence. These are interesting and relatively modern ideas, and they’re ideas that more and more people (including myself) are questioning.
I gave a talk last week about the intersection between network states and DAOs. I asked questions including, What might this look like? Is this desirable? Afterwards a friend suggested that the state is not always the best coordination mechanism. This friend pointed out that, for instance, there are very successful international organizations that exist outside the nation state system (in the sense that no single state has jurisdiction over them and, in some cases, they even have supranational jurisdiction over member states). As I thought about it further, I realized that I agree with this friend’s point, and I began to think that the key flaw in the network state thesis is that it necessarily presupposes the existence of a state in the first place, and that the state is primary.
A similar topic comes up from time to time in crypto and cypherpunk circles: is the state our friend or our enemy? What’s our threat model with respect to the state? Can we work with the state? What would have to happen for this to be possible? Edward Snowden spoke to this question during a privacy panel last week and suggested that, no, we cannot work with the state, at least not in its present form, because it’s fundamentally unaccountable.
Is the state necessary? Is it desirable? Should it be primary? I thought it would be interesting to explore these questions from a few angles.
Thing #1: Pro-state
The state as we know it has been around for a few hundred years. It’s pretty much everywhere (in different forms), and that should say something about how successful the idea has been. It’s not perfect—more on this in a moment—but it is generally pretty effective and we don’t have any other mechanism or institution that can replace it in terms of coordinating people at massive scale.
I consider myself a reluctant statist cuck. The state is absolutely necessary for a few things (ideally only a few things), mainly those things that involve coordinating to escape Moloch traps. One such thing is defense: someone needs to coordinate national defense and I don’t trust a private militia or other private actor to do that. Another is enforcement of laws, rules, and norms: I think it’s probably good that the state has a monopoly on violence. Another is protecting the most vulnerable through social safety nets, cash transfers, etc.. There are also large classes of coordination problems, like climate change, that no other actor can possibly address.
The state is an imperfect mechanism but it’s the best and only mechanism we’ve got for coordinating a nearly unlimited number of people over great time and distance. It scales well, and its worst impulses can be contained to some extent through mechanisms like hierarchy, transparency, and democracy. We mostly understand the things that make states successful and the things that make them fail, and the most productive thing we can do is try to improve the states we already have. Seditious initiatives that seek to undermine the authority of the state, from Bitcoin to January 6, risk seriously destabilizing the world order, leading to chaos and violence.
For more: Read Meditations on Moloch. If you’ve already read it, read it again. Yes, it’s long, but well worth the time.
Thing #2: Anti-state
The state is an antiquated, medieval structure. In its present form it cannot be fixed. It necessarily perpetuates power disparities. It necessarily cannot serve all citizens equally, and is always and everywhere subject to capture by unaccountable economic and political elites. Democracy, which is designed to constrain the worst aspects and impulses of the state, only functions well when the population is educated and engaged. Neither of these are true in most modern democracies, which as a result are deeply flawed and are teetering between capture and collapse.
It’s difficult to imagine an alternative since the nation state system is all we’ve ever known. However, the nation state is a relatively modern idea. It emerged in a particular place and time to address a particular need: to draw clear lines of sovereignty to prevent religious conflict. It didn’t do a particularly good job of achieving that goal, and many modern nation states are in fact totally arbitrary geographic agglomerations of disparate ethnic and religious groups, historical accidents created by commissioned cartographers with little local awareness. The degree of ongoing conflict among nation states is testament to the fact that the system is deeply flawed and never really worked as intended, and the rise in internal conflict shows that the system is reaching the limits of its usefulness and is ill-equipped to deal with the social, political, and economic realities of modern life.
I’ve never found libertarianism an especially compelling argument for the reasons laid out in the previous section: not everything can be marketized or privatized, since markets fail to account for many externalities and lots of people are simply left behind by such a system. Thoughtful anarchists like Michael Malice make a better case. Anarchism in its most basic form simply refers to a lack of formal power structures and institutions. In a functional anarchy, private citizens are free to engage in any form of trade or contract they wish, and they can form non-state organizations to address coordination problems.
Another set of related, alternative political ideas that I find attractive are decentralization, localism, panarchy, and minarchy. In a nutshell, the intersection of these systems means that encouraging overlapping communities around the world to embrace whatever system of government is best suited to their local situation. Systems of government are not one-size-fits-all, and different communities have different degrees of resources and capabilities, and different needs. Small, local government that’s responsive to the needs of its citizens is good; large governments always become unaccountable and unresponsive. Rather than a single, centralized system of government for millions or even billions of people (a nation state), we should encourage many small experiments in governance, potentially with cooperation among smaller states, akin to the city states and principalities that flourished in Europe before the nation state system arose. We live in an era of great refragmentation better suited to such a system, and we have the tools to make it work.
For more: Listen to interviews such as this one with thoughtful anarchists.
Thing #3: Middle ground
The nation state is like the furniture in the room. The furniture is there, and it does its job well enough. It might be possible to replace the old furniture with better furniture: pieces that are more aesthetically pleasing, more comfortable, or more functional. But it takes time to find or design better furniture. And you can’t just discard and replace a single piece without considering the effect it has on the overall gestalt. Generally, choosing furniture is a process that should take some time, because furniture isn’t cheap and you’ll have it, and use it, for a while.
The state is the biggest, heaviest, most important piece of furniture in the room of our society. The right path forward is not to tear down the whole room and naively try to rebuild it from scratch. For one thing, we don’t even know what we want to replace it with. We’d likely end up sleeping on the floor for a while until we figure it out, and that wouldn’t be very comfortable. And if we don’t really take the time to design and experiment thoughtfully, in all likelihood we’ll end up somewhere quite dystopian in spite of our best intentions.
Instead, the right approach is to design and build better furniture piece by piece, without throwing away what we’ve got. We should intentionally select new pieces and try them out for a while in situ, alongside our existing furniture. The process of upgrading the furniture in the room should be gradual and intentional. Over time, we can carry out meaningful and significant transformation.
We should continue to run experiments in parallel, including new voting and accountability mechanisms, as well as crypto cities, network states, and DAOs (and maybe an intersection of the two). As cypherpunks we should be willing to work with reasonable state actors on common ground, such as good privacy measures and straightforward financial regulation—while also offering pseudonymous, self-sovereign alternatives that are outside the existing system as a means of keeping everyone honest. A “fuck the state” attitude is unconstructive and unhelpful.
For more: Read about the ideas and topics linked in the previous paragraph.