Questions of political/spiritual “progress” are independently foundational. They are coupled to material/economic progress narratives (in fact they supply whatever assumed positive or negative valence the former takes on) and can be driven by tech.
But they are not derivative.
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To connect to my earlier physics analogy. Progress Studies in the Cowen/Collison sense is tautological. If your basic process models are *defined* and *designed* to be positive-only, of course net evolution will be “positive”, with negatives attributable to noise of some sort.
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Until you add process models — politics and spirituality — that can *independently* take on negative values, you can only make vacuous, high-minded statements about “progress” within an assumed consensus Whig epistemology.
How do you do that? Take Fukuyama, Arendt etc seriously.
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Going by responses so far, it sounds like people think I’m pointing to a design imagination gap. Like there’s a way to put existing tech together in a new thingocracy or thingarchy that will get us to “post democracy”.
No. Nothing ending in -cracy or -archy can fit the bill.
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There’s an *invention* gap here. We need a new breakthrough technology that makes new classes of design possible. Writing was one. The printing press was one. Radio/TV too. Most recently cryptography. Your -cracy or -archy is just a remix unless it uses a new tech in a new way.
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The mark of that is the creation of new political/spiritual freedoms that didn’t even exist before.
For example: Literacy (printing press) liberated minds to explore new intellectual domains. Literate politics organized that new freedom.
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Cryptography might create new political freedoms, but this isn’t some trivial extension of economic affordances like blockchain voting. What new freedom does it create and how does it organize the collective use of that freedom?
What’s the new freedom literacy?
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My favorite candidate new freedom that could be organized by new political models is mobility. Live/travel freely anywhere in the world. My preferred post-democratic human condition would solve for vastly enhanced mobility.
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About ~60% or more humans live in meaningful democracies today iirc. But only 3% of humans travel beyond national borders today.
The tech problem is zero-carbon transport.
The economic problem is making it orders of magnitude cheaper.
The political problem is open borders.
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Replying to
I created a few lists of styles of co-ordination; perhaps they can be mapped to co-ordination technologies?
twitter.com/utotranslucenc
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Other allocation mechanisms:
Application processes allocate goods based on the ability & willingness to persuade
Triage processes allocate goods based on the ability & willingness to demonstrate need
Games allocate goods based on the ability & willingness to practice a skill
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Replying to
Seems plausible. You could create a medium-message matrix and find the natural grain of a particular stage of societal development. For example Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities that national narratives as a coordination mechanism were an effect of print.
Otoh, there are general features of coordination problems that are technology agnostic and rest on the mathematical-logical features. David Lewis’ Classic, Convention is a study of that. Convention in his sense is orthogonal to coordination style in your sense.
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The “technology” and the coordination mechanism it enables, and problems it solves, may not have a clean logical description as in your list though. A challenge you might want to consider is analyzing Geertz’s Balinese cockfight essay as a case study in weird coordination.

