In my long contemplation of that thing sometimes called “civilization,” one insight has come through that seems significant enough to write down and share.
I've noticed that human-based systems at many scales are more robust and generative when the Trust Algorithm is applied. That's a label I've concocted to describe why the principles of accountability, authority, and capability must be aligned to optimally set the stage for trust. There's a lot to unpack in that idea, but it's rich with relevance for our changing world.
I believe in the possibility of the Civium. Human scale living + the full benefits of connectedness and innovation from a vast network.
I can see a glimpse of it in my own context here in Portsmouth, Ohio. This place was competing for the heroine capital of the US 10 years ago and worse 20 years ago. Complete devastation. The overall message was get out while you can.
Fast forward, I have access to and can comment directly (basically mind to mind) on amazing work like this. Our coffee shop is plush (Big city feel). A past Fine Art professors living in the luxury apartments above the coffee shop paints art for Magic the Gathering and Star Wars. Another gym owner down the street is changing fitness for the disabled around the world. I can make my living freelancing art/design/writing/design social media stuff. Akira the Don linked up with me over an obscure drawing I did of Peterson in an Instagram post and we did a little work together ( i am only bragging a little bit becasue he's the dopest--he's got clout!)
My point is you hear handfuls of stories like that now, in this nowhere rustbelt Appalachian town. Startup culture is big here right now and compounding. Lots of my friends starting things.
Nothing is perfect, but the Superlinear kind of growth you are describing in small-town-feeling-value-based communities seems possible, just from my own experience.
And I think that many underestimate the multiplier effect. If you model your town as a nation, then you and those you mentioned are a sort of "export". To the degree that the resources you bring in circulate locally, there is a multiplier of those resources. (My [new to me] little Appalachian town is experiencing much the same!)
Excellent arguments/ideas, matching a project which I'm working on: The Human Purpose Village Project, where the center of the idea is a sort of amazon "resource hub" (information/know-how/solutions, vendors, finance etc), hosted in a Web2 and/or Web3 context, to which all villages have access, whearas the villages themselves are structured more according to "indegenous" concepts, considering "all" aspects humans need to grow/strive/be fulfilled (sort of all 17 SDGs realized in one place), be they material, psychological, transcendent ... using the digital not to transhumanize but to rehumanize our live in concert with nature.
Deepcode, I'd love to start a conversation: http://human-purpose-village.earth is a Canva presentation, now being translated into a website ... and into "reality" with an initial group of people and even institutions over here in Germany ...
This makes a lot of sense, and have seen this pattern amongst eco-crisis aware friends (and have done myself in New Zealand), to move away from cities and towards rural towns, natural beauty, and community orientation. Still a big gap culturally between that and what I imagine mature Civia would look like but it has to start somewhere I guess...
What I wonder is how the infrastructure of the network will be maintained.
Infrastructure is a byproduct of high density population centers (cities) not a driver of them. Decentralization tends to place lower priority on infrastructure and especially on the organizations that allocate the resources necessary to maintain infrastructure.
Got solutions for these problems or are you anticipating that they are part of the growing pains that will show up and get solved on the way to the network you envision?
It’s worth incorporating Reed’s law and the notion of group forming networks which are what happens in cities (and civium). GFN is 2^n to Metcalf’s n^2.
I think the emergence of meaningfully distributed civia is a function of the availability of logistical stacks and certain size/type of space/geography. At a minimum, these are transport-energy-food-comms-security stacks which are subject to the tyranny of distance. As the current model fragments and collapses in places, many of these logistical networks will fragment as well. Ironically, this is a centralizing dynamic pulling resources towards existing cities and away from emergent distributed civia.
This phenomenon can be clearly observed in the collapse stages of the Roman empire, as the urban plebs multiplied while the more well-off drifted towards villas in the countryside. As the logistical stack collapsed, the villa model became untenable, cities diminished in size but persisted, and the motte and bailey system was born. How would a civium with a motte and bailey look like?
I have been thinking at the city-digital collision for a while, so this inquiry is exciting for me. Three related things that come up in my investigations which lead me to contrary conclusions--beside the infrastructural considerations already mentioned in the comment above--are the following:
1. Thick markets, and its ‘labour pooling’ advantage, seems to be intensified by digital mediation and its disruptions. This is because of the ‘strength of wide ties’ in the context of economic dynamism.
2. Other people, and their bodies, represent untold possibilities, especially for individuating adolescents. Will this become easier to resist?
3. The digital ‘includes the excluded’ by referencing what occurs in physical space, as ‘the exclusive’. This tantalizing sense of ‘accessible exclusiveness’ in cities seems to have been intensified and democratized starting with the implementation of location services in social networking apps. That is, cities and their virtual layer are played off each other to generate human attractors.
Perhaps there is a deeper code, or even practical tech developments, which address these things, so I look forward to more civium insights.
I"ll likely address #2 in a different post. I think that a major portion of the civium shift is from quantity to quality.
#3 a big question for me as well. Though I think that another piece of the story is a return to maturity - less of our overall choices being governed by adolescent impulses and more by mature senses.
A rebuttal. A major driver in city location and growth has been basic geographical features such as water access (e.g., rivers) that promote low-cost access to and transport of both energy and physical goods. These aspects of physical human existence aren't going away. "Industry" can only be located anywhere when transport cost is virtually zero. Perhaps the effect you describe is a centrifugal force to be balanced against the pull toward locations of inherent geographic value.
I've noticed that human-based systems at many scales are more robust and generative when the Trust Algorithm is applied. That's a label I've concocted to describe why the principles of accountability, authority, and capability must be aligned to optimally set the stage for trust. There's a lot to unpack in that idea, but it's rich with relevance for our changing world.
I believe in the possibility of the Civium. Human scale living + the full benefits of connectedness and innovation from a vast network.
I can see a glimpse of it in my own context here in Portsmouth, Ohio. This place was competing for the heroine capital of the US 10 years ago and worse 20 years ago. Complete devastation. The overall message was get out while you can.
Fast forward, I have access to and can comment directly (basically mind to mind) on amazing work like this. Our coffee shop is plush (Big city feel). A past Fine Art professors living in the luxury apartments above the coffee shop paints art for Magic the Gathering and Star Wars. Another gym owner down the street is changing fitness for the disabled around the world. I can make my living freelancing art/design/writing/design social media stuff. Akira the Don linked up with me over an obscure drawing I did of Peterson in an Instagram post and we did a little work together ( i am only bragging a little bit becasue he's the dopest--he's got clout!)
My point is you hear handfuls of stories like that now, in this nowhere rustbelt Appalachian town. Startup culture is big here right now and compounding. Lots of my friends starting things.
Nothing is perfect, but the Superlinear kind of growth you are describing in small-town-feeling-value-based communities seems possible, just from my own experience.
And I think that many underestimate the multiplier effect. If you model your town as a nation, then you and those you mentioned are a sort of "export". To the degree that the resources you bring in circulate locally, there is a multiplier of those resources. (My [new to me] little Appalachian town is experiencing much the same!)
Well said and Welcome!
Excellent arguments/ideas, matching a project which I'm working on: The Human Purpose Village Project, where the center of the idea is a sort of amazon "resource hub" (information/know-how/solutions, vendors, finance etc), hosted in a Web2 and/or Web3 context, to which all villages have access, whearas the villages themselves are structured more according to "indegenous" concepts, considering "all" aspects humans need to grow/strive/be fulfilled (sort of all 17 SDGs realized in one place), be they material, psychological, transcendent ... using the digital not to transhumanize but to rehumanize our live in concert with nature.
Deepcode, I'd love to start a conversation: http://human-purpose-village.earth is a Canva presentation, now being translated into a website ... and into "reality" with an initial group of people and even institutions over here in Germany ...
Love to chat. If you follow me on Twitter @jgreenhall, we can DM.
Great post. We have a Civium developing in and around Totnes, Devon, UK. Many people have moved there from London and Bristol over the past few years.
This makes a lot of sense, and have seen this pattern amongst eco-crisis aware friends (and have done myself in New Zealand), to move away from cities and towards rural towns, natural beauty, and community orientation. Still a big gap culturally between that and what I imagine mature Civia would look like but it has to start somewhere I guess...
What I wonder is how the infrastructure of the network will be maintained.
Infrastructure is a byproduct of high density population centers (cities) not a driver of them. Decentralization tends to place lower priority on infrastructure and especially on the organizations that allocate the resources necessary to maintain infrastructure.
Got solutions for these problems or are you anticipating that they are part of the growing pains that will show up and get solved on the way to the network you envision?
It’s worth incorporating Reed’s law and the notion of group forming networks which are what happens in cities (and civium). GFN is 2^n to Metcalf’s n^2.
I think the emergence of meaningfully distributed civia is a function of the availability of logistical stacks and certain size/type of space/geography. At a minimum, these are transport-energy-food-comms-security stacks which are subject to the tyranny of distance. As the current model fragments and collapses in places, many of these logistical networks will fragment as well. Ironically, this is a centralizing dynamic pulling resources towards existing cities and away from emergent distributed civia.
This phenomenon can be clearly observed in the collapse stages of the Roman empire, as the urban plebs multiplied while the more well-off drifted towards villas in the countryside. As the logistical stack collapsed, the villa model became untenable, cities diminished in size but persisted, and the motte and bailey system was born. How would a civium with a motte and bailey look like?
I have been thinking at the city-digital collision for a while, so this inquiry is exciting for me. Three related things that come up in my investigations which lead me to contrary conclusions--beside the infrastructural considerations already mentioned in the comment above--are the following:
1. Thick markets, and its ‘labour pooling’ advantage, seems to be intensified by digital mediation and its disruptions. This is because of the ‘strength of wide ties’ in the context of economic dynamism.
2. Other people, and their bodies, represent untold possibilities, especially for individuating adolescents. Will this become easier to resist?
3. The digital ‘includes the excluded’ by referencing what occurs in physical space, as ‘the exclusive’. This tantalizing sense of ‘accessible exclusiveness’ in cities seems to have been intensified and democratized starting with the implementation of location services in social networking apps. That is, cities and their virtual layer are played off each other to generate human attractors.
Perhaps there is a deeper code, or even practical tech developments, which address these things, so I look forward to more civium insights.
#1 is tricky and will definitely play a role.
I"ll likely address #2 in a different post. I think that a major portion of the civium shift is from quantity to quality.
#3 a big question for me as well. Though I think that another piece of the story is a return to maturity - less of our overall choices being governed by adolescent impulses and more by mature senses.
A rebuttal. A major driver in city location and growth has been basic geographical features such as water access (e.g., rivers) that promote low-cost access to and transport of both energy and physical goods. These aspects of physical human existence aren't going away. "Industry" can only be located anywhere when transport cost is virtually zero. Perhaps the effect you describe is a centrifugal force to be balanced against the pull toward locations of inherent geographic value.
Yes, it is likely that there are many other forces at play - you name an important one.