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Hard agree. “How stable, how big, and how impactful, can a decentralized social system be?” is a question I seriously want to know the answer to. Anyone have evidence?
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To the extent social science has true "mysteries" on par with those in physics, one big one is whether the idea of radically decentralized societies are actually possible, or just a recurring conceit every generation rediscovers for itself around the promise of new technologies.
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If I were revising that post today, I'd cut the section on women; it was interesting to me at the time, but kind of off-topic. The main thread -- "we can find examples of stateless societies, but they're mostly low-population-density and all preindustrial" is still right IMO.
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Go a (big) step smaller, and ask about decentralized *organizations*, & I think the answer is still "they exist and can be highly impactful and stable, but are rare and hard to imitate." See: Wikipedia, Valve, BitTorrent.
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Still big unknowns at the org level -- unknown to me, at least. Probably better explored by others who have more firsthand experience in trying to build "decentralized" or "holocracy" or "do-ocracy" orgs. Would love links to thoughts on what these models can and can't do.
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Some object-level questions: what's the largest number of people who have ever participated in a single, non-state-backed, dispute resolution system? (Like, "mediation" or "community accountability process". Trial-like investigations, no state enforcement.)
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I'm now a little suspicious of the "as above, so below" or "scalefree" tendency to equivocate between firms and nation-states when talking about "decentralization/centralization". Nations are importantly different from firms.
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Yeah for eg good firms are autocratic, good nations are anti-autocratic. Good firms tend towards monopoly but stop short of achieving it. Good nations are monopolies but tend away from it spiritually. Valences of key shared attributes flip. And many attributes aren’t shared.