If you don’t know who Balaji is, you’re missing out. I recommend following him on twitter (https://twitter.com/balajis) and listening to his latest podcast with Tim Ferris (Balaji Srinivasan on The Future of Bitcoin and Ethereum, How to Become Noncancelable, the Path to Personal Freedom and Wealth in a New World, the Changing Landscape of Warfare, and More (#506) – The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss).
Through the entire podcast, my recurring thought was “Eden is an idea who’s time has come.” The legacy institutions are crumbling, in large part because consensus is broken. We couldn’t even agree on who won the US presidential election. Technology, like Eden, that enables community consensus is the new aircraft carrier, empowering communities to take over huge swaths of digital terrain. Like @bytemaster said, people are stronger when they work together. The communities that work together best, at scale, will be the most powerful.
In the latest newsletter from 1729.com, Balaji describes his vision for the rise of “Cloud Countries.” I’ll include a snippet here since I think his ideas on community and consensus will be valuable for this community to consider. It all starts with a small virtual community reaching consensus, growing larger with new members that recognize the promise, and then the virtual realm spills into the physical realm.
7. Cloud Countries
And finally we arrive at our preferred method: the cloud country. Our idea is to proceed cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with the digital community. We recruit online for a group of people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country. We build the embryonic state as an open source project, we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values.
Over time we eventually crowdfund territory in the real world, but not necessarily contiguous territory. Because an under-appreciated fact is that the internet allows us to network enclaves. Put another way, a cloud community need not acquire all its territory in one place at one time. It can connect a thousand apartments, a hundred houses, and a dozen cul-de-sacs in different cities into a new kind of fractal polity with its capital in the cloud. Over time, community members migrate between these enclaves and crowdfund territory nearby, with every individual dwelling and group house presenting an independent opportunity for expansion.
