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.
Conversation
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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what are the biggest/most impactful *non-digital* organizations that don't have any official boss/leader?
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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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To be totally frank, I care more about the questions about states than about firms.
Org structure matters, but it seems like something that's being adequately handled? Lots of people care and are experimenting with different management structures?
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Whereas "to what extent can things that are presently the purview of the nation-state, be taken over by voluntary or competing orgs?" is a question I *don't* see a lot of exploration of.
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There's scholarship (history and econ) that gives evidence for "it is, indeed, possible for markets and voluntary social organization to provide this public good, and/or they did in the past." I'm not talking about that here.
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More like: "when do regimes liberalize?" or even "when does power become more evenly distributed?"
e.g. things like "God made men, Sam Colt made them equal."
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That’s a different question than “what can you do with a wholly swarm-intelligence leaderless flock thing with no internal hierarchies?” which I think is more ’s question. So maybe our interests diverge more than I thought.
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Replying to
I’m interested in the asymptote, you’re interested in the trajectory

