Technology Determines Political Order
What is politically feasible is a function of what is technologically feasible.
The design space for legitimate governments is larger than one might think. The key ingredient is ongoing consent, more than a particular form of government.
Every political idea has been out there since antiquity. What waxes and wanes is the technological feasibility of ideas. Technology is now making all those impractical libertarian ideas (panarchy, polycentric law, Tiebout sorting) not just practical but inevitable.
A new idea doesn’t need a consensus to have a chance. It just needs to not have too strong a consensus *against* it. A minimum alignment is necessary, a set of beliefs you need to agree on with someone, to put everything else aside and move forward on a common goal.
Any mayor or governor can pick a technology, draw a line through old laws, and put the word out to technologists. There are hundreds of countries with thousands of mayors. For any new technology, one of them will be first. Each new technology provides a new path to rapidly becoming a world city.
Democrats need to learn experts aren’t always right.
Republicans need to learn experts aren’t always wrong.
Libertarians need to learn that a state can succeed.
Progressives need to learn that a state can fail.
I truly believe in complying with every law, because you do have a gun to your head. But compliance is not submission. You can work to change the laws. Do everything you can within the law to alter the law.
Google founder and computer scientist Larry Page said any law more than fifty years old has to be re-examined. Any law written before the internet needs to get re-examined, or it's going to collapse. Cryptocurrency is going to cause the same situation.
Today we have ninty-year-old laws wielded by seventy-year-old people to prevent twenty-somethings from using twenty-first century technology.
At the end of the day, you sometimes need to work with governments. But you should always put your trust in technology over politicians because technology is what works no matter what politician is in office.
As states lose trust, their soft power declines. Less deference to the state means less voluntary compliance. Then, only hard power is left. The more states use hard power (coercion), the less soft power (persuasion) they have. Which means yet more use of hard power. It’s a negative feedback loop.
Government is not going to limit itself. Only technology can limit it.
