ME:: tl;dr-ing:: We need to adapt our local and global institutions to work with the internet ; Robin Berjon:: January 13, 2023:: The Internet Transition

Discovered: Oct 16, 2025 14:17 (UTC)ME:: tl;dr-ing:: We need to adapt our local and global institutions to work with the internet ; Robin Berjon:: January 13, 2023:: The Internet Transition

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Robin Berjon:: The Internet Transition

the authors list four small transitions that are steps along the major transition from a social organisation based on kinship and personal exchange to large-scale complex human society with impersonal exchange and an advanced division of labour:

the original human hunter-gatherer niche;

the origin of language, which facilitated cumulative cultural evolution;

the shift to sedentary agriculture and hierarchical social organisation;

the origin of states, when interactions between people who may never meet again become more regular.

The exact list is debatable but I believe that we should now add a fifth step small transition: the Internet transition, which notably includes a shift to post-geographic5 interactions

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My point is not that we need to return to locality, but that we need to build institutions that are adapted to this new reality so as to develop the institutional capacity that matches the needs of the world we want.

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There is no purely technical fix for our predicament — evidently — but for the technologists amongst us focusing on the architectural properties of our technical decisions, on how technical architecture creates or constrains institutional mechanisms, and how technology works with governance is key. To take but one example, the best governance model that is available in a client/server architecture is benevolent dictatorship. No matter how you set things up, the server can ultimately change the rules. That’s a major constraint to work with; it will eventually break most equalitarian governance models and mechanically limit collective intelligence. Peer-to-peer architectures offer a much richer set of institutional roles for agents and for the rules with which they can interact, and therefore provide a much more powerful solution space. It’s worth spending some quality time with them for that reason alone.

Networked technology that mediates so much of our lives is social engineering — which is to say that deciding how it works is politics. If we want any hope for these politics to result in a world worth wanting, we need to build our Internet according to sound institutional principles. The toolbox for that exists, figuring out how to integrate and use it is what’s next.