like to what extent can that central node use its centrality to become more central, or to what extent is that energy dissipated
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because even really sparse tribes have "big men" who don't have any more power than anybody else but they do have more influence
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…but we're talking dunbarish numbers of people; they can't really leverage any meaningful level of exploitation
pacific coast first nations are another example; historically i don't think communities got much bigger than about 5000 before bifurcating
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nation states with standardized laws and languages afford the scaling of social networks that would otherwise be disconnected, and with that, power disparity, but it's possible to imagine some change in the information environment that "flattens the curve" so to speak
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I would argue that bigger orgs/cities are socially unnatural but productively superior in some domains, which is why they emerged and stuck, ~10k years ago. So if decentralisation is to be durable it would have comparable productivity at its core. Ie the moon launch example.
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Yeah, in spite of any other appeal some find in them, IMO cities thrive because they are concentrations of jobs.
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jobs are a product of specialization + a shared culture around that
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they are more than that; they are a highly evolved protocol
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C3PO was the only character in Star Wars on the rebel side with an actual job. Everybody else was either in the gig economy or something like a priest or politician. Notably, his job was “protocol droid.” Possibly the best piece of design fiction in the franchise.
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And R2D2 was interesting too. Clearly a technical protocol droid and a character who would be written as a human hacker today, but was conceived interestingly as a spacecraft targeting module. Or at least he fit the expansion slot. Not a job per se, but a precise affordance.
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actually I tend to agree, culture *is* a protocol; a self-referencing, evolving one



