Network Nations Ep:2 Memes & Narratives — with Douglas Rushkoff & Jordan Hall

Transcript

Welcome to the network nations miniseries on the green pill podcast. I am Felix Bear and together with Primava de Filipe, I'll be your co-host for the coming episodes. Across the world, new kinds of civic communities are taking shape. Communities that use decentralized technologies such as blockchain and peer-to-peer networks to govern themselves, manage shared resources, and act together across geographic borders. We call them network nations. And in this series, we want to explore the idea of network nations as a new political design space for civil society in the network age. Our goal is to chart an alternative path from the network state, one where technology serves civil society, not the other way around. Instead of reproducing today's power imbalances and network societies,

we are asking, what if network societies were built from the bottom up as shared comments rather than from the top down as startup ventures? What if they treated members as co-creators rather than customers? What if they practiced cooperation and mutual care rather than competition and extraction? And what if network societies cultivated a sense of sovereignty that is grounded in the idea of a collective good for the many rather than a private asset owned by the few? Each episode brings together thinkers, builders, and organizers who are exploring this new frontier of community self-governance. They will help us to imagine how civil society can reclaim political agency in the age of networks and to bring shape to this idea of network nations. To learn more, you can

visit our website networknations.network where you'll find our manifesto, community resources, and opportunities to get involved with our growing network. Today, we're joined by Douglas Rushkov and Jordan Hall to explore how narratives shape the politics of the internet. We will be tracing the interplay between digital culture, social media and technopolitics and discuss how memes can help us to imagine network nations but also how they can help us to see them in the real world. Douglas Rushkov is a media theorist, author and host of the podcast team human. He was one of the first people to identify the viral logics of the digital culture in his seminal book from the 1990s actually media virus. So he was on this topic long before social media

became even a thing. Jordan Hall is a serial entrepreneur and a philosopher, also a frequent guest of this uh Greenpill podcast series. Uh and he has more than three decades of experience when it comes to designing and thinking about coordination systems. He's predominantly currently occupied with the question of how to move beyond the poly crisis and we're very much looking forward to having this conversation with these two uh thinkers uh and we will be diving into questions of how narratives and mumatics shape our network reality and can help us bring alive the idea of network nations. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the conversation.

So, welcome Jordan and Douglas uh to our show on network nations. Um we are very happy to have you today to talk about the power of narratives and more specifically how memes can help us shape our network political futures. We want to start with a general observation that Primavar and I have and that's that we are basically living through a sort of Cambrian explosion if you will of governance innovation and experimentation. So there's a lot of projects going on at the moment the network state seasteading co dictatorships but also more progressive versions like guy regional movements mutualists and solar punks who are basically developing new narratives around how we can organize ourselves beyond the limits of the nation state

and um this is like an emerging landscape I guess of like new kind of technopolitics and we would like to explore this landscape together with you today and then also discuss what the role of network nations can as like a powerful meme to shape kind of like the mind space in this direction. Um so I would love to start with picking your minds on the state of affairs. Basically what are the main kind of narratives that you see emerging and the movements um what are the big uh memes in the space of uh technopolitics that are currently capturing uh our imagination and Jordan I would like to pass the ball to you to start.

>> You have to make that move. Um, so maybe I'd lead with the the the most notable thing that I'm seeing right now is the collapse of the major narrative that defined um certainly the West and I would say largely the world postwar. So the period from the end of World War I through to the shortly after the end of World War II was a period of of kind of a narrative reboot or a narrative establishing. And we've been living in the world of that narrative. Let's just call it the post-war narrative uh since then. And that narrative is now beginning to uh break apart. Um and by the way, morally or or in terms of the

orienting values that orient people's choices as well as uh structurally in terms of the institutional forms that are the embodiment of that narrative in u procedures. And so both sides of the equation are beginning to break apart. And that therefore begins to move us into a space where this Cambrian explosion is both afforded and one might in fact ultimately also then necessary uh because we can't live together in groups without some kind of narrative to help us orient our choices collectively.

>> Cool. Um Douglas uh I saw that you gave a talk um recently um which was called the the weirding of the internet and or or the weirding of the digital. Um and indeed I think a lot of the narratives which are floating around can like uh seem pretty weird like they are making pretty big kind of announcing pretty big changes or want to bring about pretty big changes. A lot of them are somewhat worrying at least from my perspective. um like niche ideas like a dictatorship, a CEO dictatorship all of a sudden capturing a lot of mind space. Uh and I just wonder like what is your um perspective on this? Like why are we seeing this prol proliferation of kind of these niche ideas all of a sudden

like bursting into uh public discourse? >> Well, it's interesting. I mean, I felt I was around for what felt like the first burst of these in the early 1990s with the cipher punk movement and people comparing the internet to the Gaia hypothesis and uh you know there was but that felt like a positive creative you know potentiated imaginary of new world. You know, it was like a a almost a ravers utopian dream of how else could human beings

organize, you know, could the love that's informing this 5,000 person dance festival inform a new way for you government or or societies to to self-organize? And uh that gave way to this whatever libertarianism thing um we've lived through for the last 20 or 30 years. And I think and I agree with Jordan here. It got to the place where um our leadership secretly and our populations more publicly um no longer believe in the solidity or future or functionality of um government. economics, uh, planetary

management, um, as we know it. And what we're witnessing is their strategy is, and I understand it, get as rich as you [ __ ] can before the collapse because you'll be in a better position. uh at least if you have money and power something money and technology you know the the hundred people that are the wealthiest hundred people in the world especially if they've managed to engineer some kind of a some kind of a police state military way of controlling populations should survive you know and they no longer believe that there is a way for sort of everybody to make it through

right so if if everybody's not going to make it through, then I would rather way more people die and get to be one of the few who make it through than be in the same boat with everybody else. So, and in the face of that, I feel like there's a lot of us more both smart people and regular people, you know, turned on people and and and and normal civilians who are saying, "Well, if we're on our own, then what do we do?" So, some move into the prepper fantasy, which is again a a a fantasy of a kind of uh governance, right? How do we govern after as as as you know as preppers with our little guns and things in some

anarchist state and but it's it's led to a a new explosion as you're saying a new Cambrian explosion of ideas more out of um necessity. What the heck are we going to do here? How do we organize? And most of us, people like me are are even though I was all internety and LSDish and and have big brain galaxy brain ideas, the the best I can do currently is conceive of lots of local bottomup simple kabutz like villages that are somehow um working together. Um, and I've had trouble wrapping my head around a larger,

you know, the the the structure of that federation. And what I'm hoping to be able to do here is to and and through this memes conversation even to learn how to better think about the way all these things can can work together even as well as, you know, the Native American tribes did after the collapse of their uh pyramidal civilization. um how do we do this and how and how does even uh a functional technological uh network uh help us do this? So I'm I'm excited to learn that.

>> Yeah. Just to maybe briefly follow up on this and like we had this kind of weird transition like if we think back maybe like 15 years or something to Occupy Wall Street, the message was the future is canceled and now kind of the reality we're facing is everything seems possible, right? Like nothing seems off the grid to discuss in a in a in a way when we talk about governance all of a sudden. But uh although a lot of this imagination is like fueled as you say by dissatisfaction distrust in the traditional institutions like fear of this emerging poly crisis like everything you know like all these old institutions don't seem to be fit for the tasks that are emerging now there is mainly libertarian and reactionary ideas which are able to channel this in a way and I just wonder why this is so why do

we see so little progressive memes that are emerging and that are um also capturing doing more mind space, do you want to come in? >> Yeah, I I before before that question because that's the next question. I think you said something uh very interesting uh Douglas, which is like in fact like the early internet narratives were quite libertarian as well as you know like the cyber punks were all about libertarianism, the cyber punks to etc. So it feels like there is there is also many different flavors in the in the libertarianism where the internet type of libertarian approach somehow felt like empowering and felt like positive constructive whereas today which is many

maybe the internet was even more libertarian than many the things today it feels different right it doesn't have this same I don't know it feels negative for for some reason and it's a question of both for both of you is like can can you can you name what is it what is it that actually distinguish the flavor of libertarianism that the internet had and the current one that we're experiencing with those like network states studying type of things >> yeah I mean we didn't know most of us kids didn't know what we were doing was libertarianism you know it came from John Barlo kind of a grateful dead lyricist and it just sounded like getting government

surveillance and regulation away from us being able to develop this thing. Right? So we what we experienced was the FBI storming into teenagers houses and arresting them for hacking into things just not to break but just to explore. You know, it was tipper gore and a computer decency act trying to tell everyone that the internet was about child porn and gonna restrict our content. So, it felt like government get away from this thing and we so we the people can be free. We didn't know that getting rid of government meant creating free rain for corporations. It just it we didn't get that they sort of balance

each other out in a system like bacteria and fungus. So the the libertarian side just felt like raver freedom to us. We didn't really know. We didn't know from libertarianism. We didn't read Richard Barbuk and all that you know downer stuff about you know what what markets and corporations would do. It felt like the internet was it was free of corporations at that point. They weren't allowed to come on. You had to sign a document saying you promised to use this for research. So we couldn't imagine commercial activity coming on this thing. So it it seemed like the internet was going to be free of all that. The shopping mall was in the real world. The internet was for us to talk about

Gundam, you know, and which seemed like it was non-commercial to us at the time. Anyway, the difference now is that the libertarians won. They they took over the whole thing. They created these, you know, the the feudalist private platforms in the place of Usenet and Phonet and I mean Phytonet was aworked thing. It was a a totally bottomup phenomenon where people used their own computers as the internet. Your your friend's house, your friend's Radio Shack computer was the network server for your neighborhood. It was a it wasn't owned by anybody. So, we couldn't imagine what happened. And now um those that those libertarians have um well we

we know their visions of of private nations or private states. Um uh those of us who are expressing that original same psychedelic uh uh fractal urge are uh I think moving towards something much more uh progressive bottomup and narco syndicicalist or whatever it would be. So in some way like if I try to if I try to nail it down is like it feels like the early internet type of libertarianism was about claiming freedom uh away from state control. And it feels today it feels today that actually now the now the corporate is the is the one that is in control. And

so if you want to be libertarian, you kind of need to escape from the corporate control just as much as escaping from the state control. >> Yeah. You'd move towards an Adam Smith like I guess you know you know Adam Smith the was a moral philosopher though he's been adopted by the libertarians and the economist as their figurehead. Um that's no better than than Wired adopting Marshall McLuhan as their figure head. you know that Adam Smith was actually arguing for the power of local business against these abstract international corporations. But yeah, but I'm not a libertarian and I wouldn't want to speak for them, but but we can talk about the sort of the the internet counterculture urge and how easily I

think they were co-opted by libertarian memes because they didn't we didn't know what they meant. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But I think I think it's very important because I think we are all very aligned with the early internet type of libertarianism if we want to call it like that. Uh and yet we're not aligned with the current libertarianism. And so we need to we need to understand where we locate our own narrative because of I think our own narrative is close to the early internet narrative but it's also very different from the libertarian narrative.

>> Okay, that's interesting. um feels like I want to do I want to do a recapitulation to make sure we're constantly reifying the most kind of relevant stuff. Douglas and I have not even spoken I think at all really um but certainly not recently and yet we're remarkably coordinated on the big picture he just articulated. So when I look out at the at the universe of narratives that are out there sort of two bottleneck narratives that seem to dominate those who have access to the capacity to think they can navigate the bottleneck. Um, so you've got the resource scarcity bottleneck and then you got the power scarcity bottleneck.

So some people are saying there's going to be some sort of collapse of of resource or some collapse of of the ability to have everybody decide that they want to play nicely because they can get more stuff by playing nicely. And so there's a race to grab the high watermarks or the most secure locations to control those resources. And they have power bottleneckers. Those are mostly in the uh singularity side. So what they're looking at and he's saying is there's kind of a narrowing frontier of those who are in positions of of of leadership of power and the gap between number one and number two gets larger and larger and so you run into a place where there's something like a singleton or oligarch and in intrinsic oligarchy.

These two groups are are in fact dispositionally different because they have different lineages but uh roughly end up being coordinated because they're seeing something like a bottleneck. And when I look at that, the alternative that I see looks a lot like some kind of [sighs] or how do you say coordinated federation of small groups. What was the phrase you use? You did you use indigenous tribes, you know, lo local very very local groups. And the challenge then is do you how does that coordinate in such a fashion that it's able to produce a um a capacity to hold itself in resistance to the previous two? Um, and we shouldn't say there's there's there's other narratives that

are out there. Of course, there's sort of the the reestablishing of um pre-liberal structures that have Wong lineage. So, the imperial China is a real thing, which is not strictly one of the previous two, although it can be one of the two bottlenecks. Um, the global cow is is, you know, an older narrative that that didn't get erased and so it's coming back, right? So you've got sort of older legacy narratives that are reestablishing themselves as the dominant master narrative is is breaking apart and then you have emergent narratives of which there's only a handful like again the bottlenecking in this weird one that we're talking about.

So then when we talk about the weird one we're talking about um I think Douglas I'm maybe well how old are you? I'm 54 today. >> I'm I'm now I'm like 10 years older this this in the next month or so. >> Okay. So, uh, so in terms of the cyber punk, cipher punk, um, like he was the the high school kid when I was the, you know, early middle school kid, like he was the senior when I was a sixth grader and or whatever, fourth, fifth, fourth, fifth grader. And, um, so we have a slightly different view, but I was immersed up to my eyeballs in that world, too. Um, and I was, you know, hanging out on the the the hacker boards and uh figuring out how to download wares and whatnot and learning how to

and so the the ethos, right? And I want to say there's something like an aesthetic ethics sensibility which is normative about participation that is felt and absorbed by relationship that preeds something like narrative. Right? Narrative comes later. We can by the way use the logic the language of senius helps here and this is how it always happens and there was a scene right the the cyberpunk cyher punk scene and you participated in that scene by virtue of being able to grasp it and participate in it and even like fun little side quests like how do you get a list of telephone numbers for your modem to dial up into things like that. Um, >> and getting each of these things meant

sharing them as well. >> By definition, >> it was one and the same. So, it's so hard to call that libertarian because built >> how could you be an a citizen of the sharewware universe and a libertarian at the same time. So, that's part of why we didn't understand even those memes. >> The notion of libertarian implies a whole um commitment to a whole bunch of characteristics. >> I did not I have never actually read Enran. Never. So I I certainly didn't when I was 12, but I was really captured by the punk rock ethos, right? So there was a sense of autonomy. But the the key thing here I would like to say is that there was a sense of a territory. There was a space. It was the virtual space.

The virtual space was quite distinct from the physical space in which we uh lived and in which we we perceived a a a form of constraint that was very difficult to resist. You should resist it, right? School was [ __ ] to resist school for the most part uh you know government was [ __ ] so you res resist that but you resist it in kind of like the heake Bay way you found little cracks you found warehouses that nobody was at you put together your rave and you disappeared in the cracks right but in the virtual nobody else was there man >> and nobody had any idea how to play with it and the guys who were there were that were grown-ups they were kind of like you and they were ready and willing to play and they're actually really

interested in and this is where we're going to start talking about the nation sensibility. They were really interested in an actual initiation. And I mean this actually very much in the indigenous sensibility like you're being invited into a tribe and a tribe of people who are held together because of a like mind, a shared sense of values, a shared aesthetic, a shared orientation. And it's it's very broad like you don't have to particip you don't have to follow this set of rules. You don't have to believe this set of sort of doctrinal characteristics to participate. Um but you do have to learn how to play properly together. That kind of a thing.

You notice the difference? And so we're we're I think we're we're noticing now. It's kind of fun. I actually quite like this that we're Okay, guys. We we came in and I actually stepped through the portal of being an entrepreneur. I think largely because Douglas was much more in in in kind of human relationality whereas I was more playing strategy games. So when I looked at the space and the opportunity I was like hm I want to create space for my people to participate and so all right what how will I do that took a took a look at it as a game board looks like this sort of Steve Jobs Bill Gates thing I can play that role okay I can do that kind of thing and that allows me to

create space like I can force the world to shift in a way that is in accordance with the values that I that I ascri and work specifically right MP3 and DEX specifically in making this kind of conversation physically possible by modulating the territory. But I can definitely look back over the past 25, 30 years and say, man, we did not deliver on what it is we wanted to do, and now we're at uh at the the the 11th hour, like 59 minutes. Uh there's not a whole lot of time left to not pull it off. though what I'm noticing is actually a really interesting sense of urgency of saying hey folks who are in our generation and we are we are actually just at the you know in the center of a generation Douglas and I are

looking saying hey we've got a view of a long arc and we see that the doors closing on the highest possibilities we'd like to figure out how to actually make that space for the values that we can't help but still ultimately perceive as being good how do we do that So now we're having this conversation ends up being in some sense very practical. How do we actually establish what we think we ought to be doing in this context of what you're calling network nation as a an extension of the athos of that earlier period um that is just just about to exit shared memory. So one thing that you say that I think is very interesting is like the question of autonomy which is very is really strong in the early internet movement and in

fact is not that strong at all in those new libertarian things. They're not talking about autonomy anymore. They're talking about disconnection from a particular existing state entity. They're not talking about autonomy of the individual and they're actually more like creating a new system of control because they think that the corporation is a better control system than the state but it's not about autonomy anymore. So perhaps it's even like is it even is it is it actually as libertarian as the early internet. The other thing I think is that while the internet was about autonomy, it was also about interconnection and interdependence and the autonomy emerged

because people collaborate and because everything is inter interworked and therefore we can be more autonomous but we can be more autonomous together and I think this is also something that is very different from today's libertarian narratives where the notion of autonomy is very little And also the notion of togetherness is very little and it's more like let's take what seems to work which is the startup modality. Let's play the corporation game at every level for governance but not leveraging the people like it's kind of like autonomy versus capacity. like how do we augment the capacity of people through this interconnection because alone you can be

autonomous but you're not very powerful and together we can be more autonomous because we have more capacity uh through this interconnectness right and I think this is this is at least where we through the network national narrative connect very closely to the ethos of the early internet uh but also we're not about we don't name autonomy as being the main thing we actually name uh like interdependence and uh and and interconnection and entanglement but with the ultimate goal of making the people more powerful and empowered through those technologies or through those uh through those new institutional arrangements.

>> Yeah. I mean, in the in the early internet era, the way we talked about these issues um and the way we talked about the the illusion of compromise between individuality and group cohesion was to use natural metaphors. And I know there's problems with them because, you know, as as they say, the Marxists use facts and fascists use metaphors, but but they worked. So we had you know the the ryomatic metaphor which really helped us and helped us uh argue for uh something different you know for another way of understanding um colle collection we had the fractal and the beauty of the

fractal was the self similarity um we had uh and we still do you know myelial networks are great for people to understand oh there are these little separate mushrooms all over the place but they're actually connected by a global invisible network of strands that that keep it all together and that help us metabolize all of each other's stuff and solve problems and all and and along with that was chaos math which you know it would fractal math which had this this concept of remote high leverage points and everybody told that same you know Laurens's metaphor about the butterfly flapping its wings in China but the the thing that was powerful to me about it was that oh so if you have

thisorked fractal thing then huge systemwide changes can come from anywhere. So it's not that every individual is super powerful all the time, but any individual can express what the network needs at any moment. So the network can hear um each individual. And it seemed to me, oh this, you know, this is this more sort of natural state of being. So we were going to kind of take down the topdown William Randph Hurst Rupert Murdoch style of of technological communications and replace it with this uh bottom up uh interetti myelio fractal organization that where and this was our mistake where the

self-organization would just self-organize right we felt we go in it with our hearts in the right places and as Jordan said, doing the right things. When you get the good game, you go to the back. I mean, this is it's very American. You go to the back of the bus with your box of five and a quarter inch floppies and you trade them with the other kids. There's no point in having the game. Everyone gets the game and then the game is more fun. So it seemed that we would would through a new uh uh a new way of being a new a new set of behaviors would engender the organization we were talking about. We wouldn't have to do it's very lazy. We wouldn't have to do

any political activity. It just would happen somehow spontaneously. >> So it's super exciting to hear these reflections. Um and if we assume that there is still this kind of progressive capacity which is kind of um latent in internet technologies right to connect us to help us coordinate better to collaborate um and help civic communities around the globe maybe to become political agents as it was originally intended right by the early internet generations. If this is a potential which is still latent to some extent like how can we leverage this is the key question I guess we're trying to address with network nations and on the one hand side this is of course like a question of like you know how to build like sovereign infrastructures and all

of this and the web3 community is doing a whole lot to help in this direction but on another level it's about creating a shared narrative which helps to mobilize also people beyond the tech communities to kind of drive this vision right of like new internet enabled forms of organization I would say uh and I think why why we are choosing the network nation frame um for this narrative is because we believe beyond the tech stack we need like a shared sense of belonging and identity which is driving this and that's why the nation might be an interesting concept to work with because if we try to isolate it from the nation state right which has like a legacy and some problems of course the nation kind of signals that

there is like a community of people who are bound by a strong sense of kinship and this is like an aspirational ideal to which we potentially can work towards if we build the right vehicles. So that's I guess like a bit our rational and I wonder like how this um resonates with you and where you see problems or potentials with this. >> So there there were two big failures that happened in the um in the early internet and I'm here thinking kind of the transition between what became known as one and two. One failure was the uh the weakness of the kinship bonds. And so we ended up being too willing to allow simple lightweight affinity to be the the bonds and and therefore and and

this has how do you say this? This tunnels us through to to the next major error. So kinship needs to be stronger than we're than affinity. you're you're not going to be able to do the kinds of things that are necessary if all you have is like two or three opinions that you share. That's not enough. You know, if if you're if we're sort of all fans of Doth Pong, if that'll that'll allow us to coordinate a very narrow band of function and and we'll probably break apart like if if if a few of us have terminal cancer, the Doc Punk community is not going to unless those two happen to be the tough punk artists themselves uh organized taking care of them, right?

And so the the notion of kinship requires both richer and stronger bonds, which by the way implies some kind of of membrane. The word I've been using is initiation, some kind of procedure and process whereby people are brought into those relationships with enough density and continuity that they hold. And by the way, they they prove you you you know that you're really in a strong relationship when [ __ ] hits the fan and the relationship shows up. Um and these kinds of things have been done in other contexts. So we can we can map kind of the religious context in a moment if we'd like. So what happened is since since we allowed ourselves to organize around affinity which is

lightweight and easy and unfortunately is also can be large we then made ourselves available to then be to be organized by the structures that were maximally able to be built on top of that and to extract value from that. Right. So, we shifted into the corporate environment. So, I'm very much seeing Facebook or or MySpace and then Facebook with these environments where like, hey, if I can have the the most people with the minimum viable amount of affinity to move them through the lightest weight possible membrane into a world that I control, then I can get access to their attention. I can start boiling the frog and holding them there because I'm not expecting them to do a whole lot. And

therefore what ended up happening is we forked right the timeline forked. We forked into the timeline that we've been living for the past 25 years where all of the energy in the system for constructing the kinds of how do you say ordering and culturating orienting structures have been captured by a very narrow set of possibilities. and all the human attention has been what do you call it distracted by a lot of small things right and so what ends up happening for example is the in fact I bet we could even find the time when this happened but the the horrible de uh degeneracy of the of the flag icon right the how am I going to respond to an

event that I don't like while I'm going to put up a flag or a little thing next to my pe my my my identity that says that I stand with whoever is the you know the the thing at the moment which of course the point is That's the nar that's the channel that that that emotion could be pushed through on the platform as it currently exists which is awesome because it allows the current platform to allow everybody to focus a little bit of energy but it doesn't do anything right so >> so then the next piece um I'll use metaphors I guess I'm a fascist um super saturated solution right this is a very important thing for those who are still hanging on to keep in mind have this idea like the super saturated solution I've got the kind of the visual of the jar and it looks like a liquid,

but if I hit it, it suddenly turns into a crystal. We're in a super saturated solution. Uh where we're in an environment where where the things that need to happen to establish a movement tremendously through to a much higher level of capacity are just right over there. Um we just have to hit it properly. We have to hit this global network with the right angle with the right um autoc catalytic protocol so that the right small bit changes and that small bit then potentiates the next bit changing and the next bit potentiates the next bit we go through a series of what are called trophic cascades and we find ourselves on the other side of something and this can happen by the way like tomorrow if we got it done right because the potential

is extremely bound up. I think we are we are very uh align on like we we feel that there is this thing like I think the reason that people buy those solution most people that I think are like pro network states and uh uh pro whatever weird narrative is popping up I don't think they are actually I think they are just really dissatisfied of the current state of affair and in some way people are just hungry of hearing something that is kind of like radically different uh and whatever is radically different from the present is salient.

So I think our challenge of course is like how do we create just as much of a salient narrative that can actually help the people that currently have been providing allegiance to those those techno libertarian type of corporate narratives to also see other radical um possibilities that are just as silent and interesting. Um I was at this conference last week and then I was kind of discussing this and then someone said um said something that really uh disturb me but made me out of thinking and I was I was asking like what's the narrative?

Why are there no movements like actual movements around the commons? There is like maybe the digital commons but you don't really have like those powerful movement and those powerful leaders that are bringing the movement forward. Um and the answer that this person said was that the commons they actually the narrative of the commons is such as to attract people that don't want to be the leader and it's attracting those people that just constantly question and constantly like you know don't do things don't don't actually move forwards and don't have the drive of actually I'm going to be the leader of this movement follow me because it's very antithetic to the commons

Um, so I think there's also this interesting thing because when we look at those movement leaders that are actually taking on those people are not afraid of positioning themselves as leaders and getting followers to follow them. Um but if you want to eat your own dog food and if your movement is about um emancipation of individuals and uh and not actually taking the power position in order to influence people to follow you, it becomes really hard to be the leader of that movement. Um so I'm very curious like what's your take on that?

>> Let me see if I can layer in a couple of pieces. uh in order to in order to navigate the complexity of the environment we find ourselves in, I think quite often we're going to have to actually go relatively deep. So I hope that's uh not going to annoy people who are watching. Um so for example, for the most part, we tend to import the basic ontology that was developed at the period of the enlightenment in order to think about the world. Right? So for example, we tend to assume often times as a presupposition. We don't even think about the notion of the the liberal individual as an ontological primitive and and therefore we end up being constrained in our degrees of freedom because we're actually importing a bunch

of stuff that is both false and not helpful. For example, just now there is an assumption if you're operating with the the liberal individual as your onlogical primitive that what you do is ultimately let's say arbitrary or constrained by things like preference or strategy uh mostly objective in nature. So we're like, hey, I want to be a person who's protecting the commons because I think that's an important thing to do. And we assume that basically everybody's effectively neutral and you can kind of load responsibility on people on the basis of either what is the most efficient resource allocation or people's preferences. But if I hearken back to a ontology that predates that, right? So I'm doing a this a recovery

process. Um, and I got this, by the way, by talking almost entirely to indigenous groups, most specifically in this case, the Polynesians. Um, that's actually not how their ontology works at all. Right? The way their ontology works is every distinct individual human, every human, every person actually has a proper responsibility in the world that is theirs specifically that they are uniquely prepared to to take. It' be called their kana in the Polynesian. And by the way, you would have an appropriate amount of of power or capacity in the abstract sense, not in the sense of practical to properly steward that. And the reason why I bring this up is if you look horizontally at a variety of different kinds of non post-Enlight, non-western enlightenment

ontologies, you discover that the commons is in fact properly stewarded by somebody who looks like what we would now call a king, somebody who has a wholeness of responsibility. And and by the way, what I have to do here is I now have to say, by the way, we're living downstream of a very long history of anti- king propaganda, which leads us to the weirdly denatured frame of somebody like Yarvin, which I will actively rebuke as being both foolish and wrong. Um, when he has this idea of promoting the monarch and then saying that like the CEO of Walmart is a monarch, which is exactly perfectly wrong. Um, a proper monarch, right, which is to say a proper

chief, a proper person who is holding a responsibility has precisely the opposite sensibility as a CEO, which is to say that they take as their um when I say they take as their responsibility, they take as part of the essence of who they are, their identity is in fact a wholeness, some kind of commons that they must actually steward up to and including their death. And so they they're not only able to but they can't otherwise then surrender or sacrifice themselves into the protection of the whole the co commons that is theirs to protect and that's not at all what what the technocrat uh what would you call it singleton or technocrat uh

center point looks like or or behaves like. So part of the reason why we've run into the problem of the commons is that we're endeavoring to navigate commons using post-enlightenment ontologies and epistemologies and those are intrinsically anti-coms in their nature and so of course they're not going to either be strong enough or trustworthy enough to do it. >> Yeah, I was going to say enlightenment and I know you know more about the enlightenment than I do. I I specialize in late late medievalism as this sort of golden age, a different way of understanding the relationship of the individual to uh where they live and how they work. And and it it seemed to me that you your original question had something to do with sort of the

reluctance of people to uh to take on leadership roles in this. And I do think it has it does have something to do with the way that the enlightenment defined the individual and and sort of personal freedom and responsibility and all. And um we we it was something I really started to think about during Occupy when people were criticizing Occupy for that that there were no leaders. Oh, there's no leaders. And I kept saying what? Everyone's a leader. It's filled with leaders. you can't recognize it because you're looking for, you know, Moses rather than what does uh uh what does it look like when everyone is

taking taking on some kind of a leadership role. And I feel like again going back to the a network nation there is I would say there's a an enhancement of what individuality truly is um in a in a common in a collective commons network structure um that you don't get in it's it's like it it has to we were raised with this notion of the individual as a part like as somehow manifesting one's individuality requires their separateness or being pedestal that I I've been thinking so much about indigenous understandings of this versus western ones. I went to see the new

Rockefeller wing at the the Met in New York and looked at all of the South American African and uh you know uh and island art. And in the next wings you could see the Greco Roman stuff and the the Greco Roman stuff were these perfect they were statues made with absolute verimilitude of utterly unattainable body types. you know, they they looked perfectly real but were fictional and pedestalled and up and I was like, well, if you're starting to think of leadership is that I don't want to be a leader. I can't be that, you know, rather than thinking of, you know, uh the leadership and in a more almost a compino uh uh context or

leadership in the Zap Zapatista movement again, which was something that was Zapatistas were celebrated on the early internet because they seemed to be the kind of movement um that we could build again along with the commons which which was exactly pre-enlightenment. the commons the the it was pre-printing press. It was pre Protestant Reformation. It's when when people had the ability to understand home not as the house they lived in but the town uh the town they were from.

>> Yeah. Maybe building a little bit on what you just said and especially what Jordan was working on. I think one thing we are trying to understand is like what kind of values we want to embed in our narrative and is this new narrative about you know new network forms of coordination only a set of policy propositions like we know it from the political realm or are we trying to design a new environment for coordination as such right you could describe for instance the nation state also as a coordination technology which kind of affords a specific sets of you know politics like autocratic nation states through democratic nations that estate progressive to conservative um politics. Um, and in this way I think >> Exactly.

>> Right. >> But when you when you go there and that's the place that I was I was going to go. I didn't want to be critical of I mean because I'm the memes guy, right? I wrote the book Media Virus. I was all in memes. Believe me, they were my my thing. But I'm I'm thinking it's so much more that that narrative is communicated almost more like an Allen Capro happening. It's it's it's communicated almost more like a video game through the what are the rules through which we engage or a reality TV show which has no written story but how do we set things up so that the story that we want to see played out happens and that's I mean in some ways it's beyond my pay grade but that's what I'm hoping and I what I do

know is if you set it up like they're set up on Twitter X you don't get the story that that we want. Right? >> I have a very challenging question uh following this which is so if the meme is about tapping into a particular type of minds that are ready to accept this meme. I think like if if we go back to like the early internet because I think it's actually uh a very a very illustrative example. The reason that the early internet was cool, it was because the type of people that will join the early internet were cool, right? Uh it takes a

particular mindset to join this network when this network has pretty much nothing but weirdos that are trying to figure out what technology does. Um and then the internet expands and then many other people join. And in fact, those people might actually not be the explorers. those people are more interested in having a comfortable service that works and they don't want to have to build their own server. They just want to have like someone else that take care of them. Um and therefore the internet has evolved to accommodate these new population with services that are accommodating uh in this feudal sense of like the the technology operators. And so the the challenging question is like today I think that my

my my intuition and I hope I'm wrong. My intuition is that uh the majority of the population today has has lost the muscles of actually seeking autonomy and uh yeah is at the expense of like seeking comfort and convenience and whatever, right? Um and so if we want to craft a meme, but if this meme is actually something that only those those mindsets that are still looking for we want to like you know do it yourself, we want to actually like empower oursel and like interconnect with other people. Um as opposed to the other mindset which is we want someone to tell us how to do

things right. Right. Because we don't like how it works now. So you know bali tell us what to do. So the challenge that I see is that we can craft a meme that is very salient to those people that were the early internet users and that have maintained that muscle. But that meme will not be salient to a very large population that actually just has shut down their autonomy muscles and just wants to to have someone taking care like the good king to take care of them. um as opposed to therefore if we have to craft a narrative where we want to to contaminate all the mindset this narrative will be very different because it needs to uh to be appealing also to

people that are actually more like followers as opposed to explorers. Um and so the challenging question is like are we like where do we want to put oursel like as we're building this narrative do we want to be extremely extremely specific and extremely salient but only to a very small portion of the population and hoping that these will give an example for other people to see oh actually I I would like to use my autonomy muscles as well or do we want to try to reduce the salency of the narrative but cover a much larger space which becomes more like a populist approach. Um but of course then we don't filter anymore because we just as something that is pleasant to everyone

but it's pleasant also to people that will not act upon it because they they don't want that. They they're not yet there has not been the cultural change that makes it such that the meme we want to convey is ready for that the population is ready for this meme >> and they're orthogonal. They're almost like you know vertical and horizontal. So the set of memes that you would be propagating broadly should be memes that are associated with health. Memes that are associated with individuals orienting themselves on an upgradient towards more capacity to engage with the world. We have to recognize that we're dealing with humans that are very very far away from just being ordinary humans in terms of their capacity to do things like as you said think or engage or have agency. And so there's a massive healing

problem in many many many many different ways. uh probably about nine different dimensions that has to happen and this can happen hyperlocally I mean at the individual level and so there's one set of means that are deployable for everybody and the point is they have to be how do I say it right they have to be singular they have to be unique because each individual has a particular frontier of where they are able to go next you can't build a general purpose solution for them they could you could build a universal solution that is then perfectly singular and then in the vertical you are actually dealing with a cluster of of seed crystals. So you you potentiate precisely that tiny fraction and it may be you know a thousand people

to begin with who are ready, willing, able to step into something. But the point is that those the selection function is those people are by nature and by competence oriented towards cultivating the next trophic cascade. And so the thousand becomes 10,000. And it's not or it's not a linear growth. It's not the 10,000 are the same as the thousand. is rather that the thousand create a new field effect that enables 10 more people to attach because it's a it's the thing just got easier to do. That's how the internet worked. Remember um in the beginning if you couldn't actually h hard code HTML you couldn't make a web page and somebody came along and made a tool that made it easier for people to make web pages which made meant more web pages were being produced by more people you know etc etc etc. So

um on the one hand you need to raise the level the water level of just people in general enable them to be like not torpified by terrible ideas um able to discern what they actually care about things like that. I mean it's shocking but it is obviously the reality. And then in the vertical dimension, it's very carefully identifying the the critical elements that have to be at the beginning and then allowing those critical elements to then begin the process of changing the nature of the environment so that it more and more people the next wave and the next wave and the next wave can engage. Each one is going to be qualitatively different than the previous because the the millu has been changed by the previous ones, >> right? I think and another starting

point also I think I like so I also believe both has to happen. Um if we talk about the broad memes which can you know catch on with broader parts of society as well. I think we have to center also around specific needs, right? Like this is like a very lofty conversation which is highly abstract and that has its place of merit but at the same time there is just very urgent needs which need to be addressed if we talk about you know like developing something which has some sort of like uh merit for citizens and I think like politics set aside Mandami is a very interesting example because like his political campaign for instance focuses in the first place around one need for New Yorkers right which is affordability and then he has quite a complex and elaborate policy proposal of like you

know what he wants to change and the local administration and so on and so forth. But they are all linking back to this core message of making New York affordable again. And I think if we talk about you know um bringing this network nation mean to the broad you know broad level of society we need to identify also what concrete needs we are trying to address with this >> as as I guess as the originator of viral media as a as a term. Um, one thing that was that to me was essential about the media virus is that it had two parts to it. It had a sticky protein shell on the outside, which was what allowed it to

get attention and allowed it to stick on, but then it had the code inside that had to challenge cultural code in order to replicate. So the original Rodney King virus is the one one I wrote about as sort of the the the prototypical virus. The the thing that made it originally spread was a breakthrough use of media. Someone caught something on their camcorder. Cops beating somebody up. The reason why it spread was the genetic code inside which was, you know, racism and police brutality and the urban situation and all. So it spread and then led led to riots. So it was a a a successful meme in that it had those

two things. >> This is a really great recipe that you're giving us to think about how do we actually construct this uh this narrative or perhaps this dual narrative because perhaps we need two uh which have those properties right um like how do we get the stickiness and how do we get the substance of of of change of of radical change I guess. So with the network nation narrative, I think perhaps one one specificity that I think we're trying to promote is that it's not actually drawing from this dissatisfaction or resentment or like it's not trying to like build out of not liking what is there, but it's actually

trying to convey a positive direction towards you might want to go regardless of whether you like the current state of a version or not. So it's not it's not it's not leveraging the the stickiness. What's the stickiness? Right? It's like it's pretty easy actually because today things are going quite wrong. It's very easy to create a meme where the stickiness is we don't like the current status quo. Let's change it. That's the initial stick. Can we actually like will that work? and and what could that look like if we're trying to craft a meme which is not building on that type of stickiness but is actually more this like you know utopian uh but without being too utopian level

>> the stickiness is usually coming from breaking a rule of media of some kind usually structural so Madonna the stickiness is showing her vagina for Michael Jackson it's getting plastic surgery for Rodney King it was the tape itself for the OJ Simpson And it was people going outside during the OJ Simpson chase and walking onto their own television sets in order to watch an action in real life. Uh they they always they always challenge they involve some breakthrough in the way media or technology is being used. Then the inside the genetic code is something that is able to challenge the the the the broken or insufficient code in

society. So it's able to uh uh to challenge a law or a a a prejudice or an inequality um in some way. So even occupy broke the rule, we're going to stand in this place without any demands. What the [ __ ] is that? you know, and then it it ultimately it to the extent that it succeeded, it nested in the the obsolete code of a Wall Street driven economy that doesn't serve human beings anymore. So, you know, it it was able to spread in that way. And the the the other thing about two levels in this case, and I've never quite put it back together like this, was, you know,

Spinosa used to write about how you have to write on two levels. You write on one level for the general public to make your stuff popular and and in a way that they can understand, but then on a second level for the people who can actually do something about it, who you're actually trying to communicate to. And how do you keep those two different levels of writing consistent? So the first one's not a lie or a patina around it. So in this case, it's like if we're going to make a sticky media virus, which is the stunt part, with genuinely important memes, how do you find a a a shell uh how do you break a rule that really does symblize or is emblematic of the true value um inside

it? And that's I think where this whole network non-local something there's the the the what what the network state guy did get right is like whoa you mean you can run a nation on a blockchain that's the stickiness of his >> of his approach. >> So it's very important that we not accidentally import previous media environments in terms of how we think about reality. So for example, Mamdan's approach at the end of the day is a high and mature television mentality. >> In other words, he he is by nature broadcasting to a whole population. So he has to select the very specific message that the m a critical mass 51% of the population will identify as being salient enough to attach their

attention. >> Right? >> That is not an internet way of doing things at all. That's not how you do it. So imagine it more like this. Imagine if you had a And by the way, I'm not recommending this at all, but it's a way of imagining it. Imagine if you were able to disseminate an AI chatbot that would initiate a person in a interlocatory conversation that would elicit their highest yearnings, their highest values, and the things that made the most sense to them and then would articulate to them a bespoke narrative that map simultaneously to the thing that they connect with the most powerfully on an individual basis and also was actually true in terms of linking back to the underlying protocol of what it is unfolded.

>> That's an internet way of doing things, right? This is this the kind of the Facebook direct marketing sensibility. So >> think about it from that way, right? We're saying, "Hey, >> all right. So that's one. Now, now I now what I want to do is I want to do a fork because there's two versions of virality. Uh we typically operate in a version of virality which at the end of the day is something like exploitative. We could use the classic virus. It's a pathogenic sensibility. But there are also things that operate along that dissemination vector that are health producing. They make they make those who have them stronger. I use the term anti-rivalist to define that entire category topologically. So what we want to be doing is we want to be doing things that have this characteristic of

being polymorphic, bespoke and anti- rivalous in the nature of how they disseminate. When somebody encounters the vector, the vector is able to rapidly identify a way of fitting to them which by like we can say by hypothesis is actually the most salient thing that is imaginable for them as an individual in that moment of their life. All right. Do we just say by design that's the actual our our our vector will be designed as the ultimate vector available in any given moment because we can design it that way. And then the payload will be designed as the payload that is most neutrative to them in the context of them and in the context of their ability to participate in the unfolding protocol. Obviously you can't do that with a with a television

mentality. Right? If we think of narrative in the frame of a a book or a movie or or a linear piece of of prescriptive programming, you can't possibly do that. It's impossible. But if we think of in terms of like an improvisational role playing game, then it's trivial, right? Where you have a one-on-one DM who's interacting with everybody who also has the ability to be interfaced with a larger population. So that's the that's the topology. Like think about that as the topology and then work out from there. >> Jordan Douglas, thank you so much for coming on to the show. um was super fascinating. We have to cut it here unfortunately um because of time but I'm sure our listeners would love to follow your work. So maybe you can briefly share where they can find your stuff.

>> For me just go to team human team.fm uh it's my uh podcast and you can find everything from there and I I strongly recommend you not follow my work. So that's easy, >> right? Follow my work but don't follow me. I'm not a leader of the commons movement. you you two are very powerful uh matic uh uh sources. Um so I think you also definitely can uh can help the cause uh you know like by writing about it by talking about it. So it's like Jordan you can be like the one building the website for other people to to make uh to make >> I think we've both been doing that for about 30 years.

>> Best to finally meet you Jordan. Nice to meet you too. Yeah. And and Primav, you're welcome to invite us both out to France or wherever that is to experiment with us. >> Welcome. You're but welcome more than ever to our hyper local community uh in Burgundi. >> Beautiful. Yeah. >> Where we're building the network nations. >> Thanks so much for coming on.