Glen Weyl on Overthrowing the Network State
Description
"Primavera (@yaoeo) and I are speaking to Glen Weyl (@glenweyl), the founder of RadicalxChange and a co-author of Vitalik Buterin and Puja Ohlhaver’s article on Decentralized Society. During the discussion we spoke about Balaji’s oversimplifications in the book, how TNS was not written for human beings, and Glen’s alternative for a Networked Society differs.
Overthrowing the Network State (OTNS) is a series in collaboration with Blockchaingov where we critique The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan while also pulling out the salvageable parts and concepts in discussion with a variety of guests. We are overall critical of Balaji’s specific ideas in the book, but we want to discuss it with intellectual honesty and highlight the larger concepts around how these technologies are and could subvert state structures."
Summary:
For the second episode of Overthrowing the Network States, the podcast series hosted by The Blockchain Socialist and Primavera de Filippi, they welcome Eric Glen Weyl, an economist and a researcher at Microsoft Research New England, where after being a Web3 CTO advisor, he now leads the Plural Technology Collaboratory, the world’s largest plural technology research group. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Economy at Princeton. Then he taught at Harvard and Yale. He co-authored the book « Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society » with Eric Posner. This book has gained recognition in the Web3 community, including Vitalik Buterin's interest, bringing him to crypto. Later, he founded RadicalxChange, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to building a community and education about democratic innovation. He is also the founder of Plurality Institute, which aims to gather people from various fields, such as computer science, political ethics, sociology, and government, to develop and experiment with Plural Technologies. How to broadcast a disruptive idea?
Primavera de Filippi underlined a similarity between « Radical Markets » and « Network States » because their two books became famous because of the underlying concepts they carry. Eric's book is based on the idea that market design can be redesigned, while Balaji's book proposes the possibility of exiting society and creating a new one.
About this, Weyl described the journey that crosses an idea from the creation to the application in two ways:
• The optimistic one: people are more likely to follow and believe in an idea when it is carried and embodied by a person who acts like a guide. According to Eric, the guide here is Balaji, who eliminates his enemies with his sword.
• The pessimistic one: sometimes, even for well-intentioned groundbreaking concepts, they can’t be cleaned from the drips from the sword. To illustrate this purpose, Eric takes the example of Marxism, which suffered from a bad image more than a century later, mainly because of USSR totalitarianism, and the thousand of dead made by Lenine and Staline regimes to impose their conception of communism.
The problem with current governments
Balaji believes that governments were created to manage interdependence between people that markets could not regulate, but according to Eric, markets cannot address most of the challenges people face. Governments have never been able to manage all the issues arising from the links between people.
Balaji suggests that new publics need to emerge and be empowered to govern relevant issues. Many edge cases are appearing, showing that states aren’t always efficient. Eric’s example of rivers that flow through multiple countries shows that state management is inefficient regarding everyday resources.
The need for alternatives
As previously mentioned, "The Network State" inspires the Web3 community to envision a more efficient alternative to the current system of states and nations, a world they would prefer to inhabit. Balaji proposes to bring together highly aligned communities based on shared values or interests. This requires sufficient alignment among individuals to enable collective action.
The limits of The Network States
But later in the episode, the three speakers stroke that it is impossible to find something fundamental enough to unite a good amount of people capable of collective action only because they agree on one basic thing since they can disagree on a lot of other things. Even at the end, they made jokes about practical cases to show to what extent the idea of a network state cannot work. By the way, Balaji never explained in a concrete way how all this networks states are interconnected. Indeed, because the Network States are based on governance, how is it possible to benefit from service from another Network State if your two network states are based on different alignments (which are not necessarily opposite, just different)? He does not write about the precise implementation, even if it would be desirable since many paradoxes appear just by quick, simple thinking exercises.
It also shows the limit of exit-based governance. Indeed, exit in the tech world can work: if people are unhappy with a service, they can still choose another one. But Balaji wants to apply this to state governance: he wants to throw politics out of the picture by the assumption that « if everybody is highly aligned, whatever the founder (who is also the commander) of the NS will do, the community will agree. And if not, people can leave. But, unfortunately, the exit-based governance proposed leads to a highly centralized society, which makes The Blockchain Socialist thinks that people from the Web 3 community that agree with this book have not read it. Also, exit-based governance just eliminates the diversity that exists in actual states. But if one takes a step back, a Network State world is a world with a plurality of communities instead of a majority of individuals, so politics do not happen inside the network state, between all the Network States, where exit does not exist anymore. So « The Network States » has not deleted the problem of agreeing on a compromise; it has just moved it to another place…
Finally, The Network States vision appears to be a simplistic application of the tech startup mindset to state governance, overlooking many inconsistencies and paradoxes, even if the underlying idea of trying to find a more efficient way for people to gather around the similar interest to be more efficient than states currently are. Eric Glen Weyl proposes a more comprehensive alternative called "Network Society." In this system, every individual is part of a plurality of governance networks democratically governed by participants, making them decentralized. Also, every member is part of other networks, which kind of defines identity because nobody can have the same pattern. This means, by creating plurality and diversity, still brings people together."
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