The Imagination Ceiling

One of the people who know me best once told me, "You know, Neter (they used my government name, of course, 🥸), you're somehow overly optimistic about the individual, but at the same time, overly pessimistic about the world. You always think the sky is falling, but somehow, you believe people are just one stat, one piece of data, one blog post away from understanding the source of their individual and collective problems, but that's just not the case."

I'll never forget that. Over time, I've discovered this synthesis of humanity was right (but not for the reasons I thought at the time). Some people can't envision a better future. Whether due to a lack of information, living in a constant mode of anxious survival, or the learned helplessness built on generations of watching what happens to the dogs that try to escape the kennel.

It provokes an innate understanding that even if we could pop the latch to our cage, teach a few others the same, and triumphantly wander the halls sniffing for The Exit (even if a few of us could find it) - the punishment for those that didn't make it would be so severe, debilitating, isolating, and lonely - that such a prospect rarely seems worth the risk.

"What would we do out there anyway? We'd have to fend for ourselves and find our way. We get three meals a day here. What else is out there for us?" This mindset, while pervasive, discounts humanity's core strength: coordination.

I hated this perspective growing up. A culture of fear drives a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's complete BS.

What do we as humans DO? What human output do philosophers, anthropologists, and historians all agree on as the core basis of humanity?

We excel at thought-complex communication, sure. Others say it's creating and sharing knowledge, altering our environment, innovating, and creating technology. All true, but these outputs are downstream of what humanity excels at. 2nd order effects.

Humans coordinate. We coordinate with each other in small groups. We coordinate over long periods. In some cases, if our incentives and drive (our core drives for coordination) are aligned, we coordinate large groups over long periods.

Coordination is the foundational mechanism human societies evolve, adapt, and innovate. In this piece, we will explore how technological, social, and moral shifts have repeatedly redefined the possibilities and abilities in scale and duration of human coordination. When dealing with history, we tend to analyze the past chronologically. But that's not what happened. We've developed over several experiments, small hypotheses, and tests, punctuated by quantum leaps in technological, social, or moral innovations unbounding the possibility of newer, more potent, more scalable forms of coordination.

The history of human coordination is not directly chronological - despite the protests of our little reptilian brains. Human coordination exists on a multi-dimensional map of scale & duration, of centralized & decentralized coordination nexus points, on the spectrum of physical & cloud spaces. A matrix - The Matrix of Coordination, if you will. (Creative minds stay with me; this will make sense). But first, we need to understand what drives us to coordinate in the first place.

The 5 Pillars of Coordination

Even on small scales over short durations, coordinating people involves competing incentives and objectives and the pesky barrier of individual free will. Tradeoffs always complement coordination.

Luckily (for the species' survival), we can only achieve things by working together. When someone says they saw something that 'restored their faith in humanity,' they're likely referring to the display of people working together to achieve one of these five core drives of 'minimum viable coordination' (MVCs) - the Pillars of Coordination.

1. Survival and Prosperity: Basic economic and survival needs.
2. Power and Control: Governance & decision-making
3. Knowledge and Understanding: Accumulating and sharing of information.
4. Social Connection and Identity: Building social bonds and shared cultural identities.
5. Creation and Self-Expression: Pursuing innovation, creativity and the arts.

These five pillars represent the simplest form of coordination needed to achieve a shared goal, and they show up everywhere. No matter where you look, if two or more humans are connected and not fighting, one of these MVCs will likely be at work.

These are the coordination pillars, which are the minimum incentives humans are willing to coordinate around, and the coordination systems. Once defined, the rest of the system becomes easy to explain.

Axes of Coordination: Mapping the Matrix

Every coordination system has an X and Y axis.

• The X-axis represents the coordination duration, while
• The Y-axis represents the parties involved (scale).

It looks something like this:

By extending the lines of the X and Y axes into cells, you can start to see coordination systems that fit the scale and duration within a cell. Two people meeting for a day is a lunch. Ten people meeting for a month could be an artist residency. Where 10,000 people meet for six months could be a Massive Open Online Course. 100k+ meetings for a year could be a university.

In addition to scale and duration, coordination also varies along two other dimensions: centralization and physical or digital space (cloud). These dimensions form the 'Superordinate XY-axis,' layering on top of the duration & scale axes, respectively.

Escape the Hunger Games

I've likely sufficiently strained your eyes, so let's shift gears and discuss The Hunger Games. The most exciting detail of The Hunger Games is how every . The strong-willed people of District 8 could not have any information flow with the rebellious, technologically-adept engineers of District 4. No district knew the original purpose, history, and truth of .

Their only source of information was the centralized coordinator (The Capitol in this analogy, but the Roman Empire, Catholic Church, Facebook - really any centrally coordinated adversarial power will do). The Capitol swiftly quells dissent & deterrence exploration outside residents’ home districts through fear-based coercion.

In this case, each quadrant, or district represents a different coordination system:

• Quadrant I centralized coordination in the physical space.
• Quadrant II decentralized coordination in the physical space.
• Quadrant III centralized digital (cloud) coordination.
• Quadrant IV decentralized coordination in the cloud.

In developing this matrix model of coordination, the parallels between the subversive tactics of “The Capitol” & the established centralized coordinators of Quadrant 1 & Quadrant 3 (and the organizations the operate in both). Both groups wield (& maintain) their power through dismissing, denigrating, and dis-informing the public of the strength embedded in the decentralized systems of Quadrants 2 & 3 - keeping the residents from exploring alternative methods of coordination & usurping their hold onto the collaborative power of humanity.

Traversing the Quadrants

Each ‘District’ had unique resources, tactics, leaders, and coordination points. However, it was when individuals began traveling between districts and sharing knowledge of what was occurring, what tactics were successful, and who could be trusted, that an organic resistance began. A centralized nexus of coordination in the physical space represents Quadrant 1 systems.

Their core attributes include hierarchical organizations, top-down decision-making, efficient coordination & scale, and heavy reliance on enforcing compliance (either through sociocultural pressure or military might) - aligning them firmly with the Age of Hierarchies. These coordination systems are just as well-known for their spectacular feats as their colossal collapses at scale.

The Birth of a Quadrant

Quadrant shifts often involve significant technological and social changes. Quadrant 1 systems coordinate around Power and Control first, followed by Survival and Prosperity. Highly effective at scaling, these systems do so at the expense of individual autonomy. Maintaining scale seems to be the problem at first glance.

But at the root of Quadrant 1 systems at scale, is actually their underdeveloped Self-Expression and Creativity pillar, which hamstrings the internal stability of the system over long durations at scale.

That doesn't mean these systems willingly give up power to another quadrant. On the contrary, it’s actually a technological shift that catalyzes further change.

So, what was the technology that shifted us from centralized coordination, or unlocked, decentralized coordination in physical space (Quadrant 2)?

• Written Language: recording knowledge, translating language, building on ideas
• Printing Press: Enabled the distribution of decentralized knowledge

Social innovations like the Republic of Letters, build on the technological changes - allowed for the establishment of the core of Open Science, peer review, attribution, and open collaboration, pre-dating the university system (a shining example of a distributed social innovation being adopted by both Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 4 systems).

The birth of Quadrant 2 brought us systems of localized governance and mutual aid networks. These organizations employed a governance model more in tune with community-based decision-making & resource sharing - rather than hoarding & top-down authority.

Two groups in particular, the Guild Systems of Medieval Europe & Nomadic Tribes, maintained standards and social structures in similar distributed ways.

Guilds: maintained behavioral, education, and production standards through apprenticeships & internal governance. They also managed governance, dispute resolution, and legal support - all through this distributed coordination system.

Nomadic tribes: maintained resilient social structures through shared cultural norms and communal ownership (as seen in many Quadrant 2 organizations today (Co-Ops/Communal Gardens.)

A lesser-discussed but still poignant example was the early Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts organized into local troops, each led by an adult volunteer. The troops operated independently, and Scouters and the regional councils had significant freedom to adapt the program to local needs and conditions.

They standardized training manuals and handbooks and published them, providing a common framework for all the scouts. The Boy Scouts also employed a patrol system, where each troop was subdivided into smaller units, and each patrol was waxed by a patrol leader, usually a more experienced or older scout.

These quadrant II coordination systems were adept at decentralized coordination, which enhanced adaptability for small-scale organizations but were limited in scalability. They prioritized self-expression, creativity, social connection, and identity, which addressed the issues of limited autonomy present in Quadrant 1 coordination systems.

However, new technology was on the horizon, bringing new social and moral innovations and giving many of these coordination systems a new dimension in which they could coordinate and organize.

A New Axis of Power

The birth of the Internet not only created a new quadrant (Quadrant 3), but also brought us Quadrant 4 - as coordination had a new space to virtually assemble. Centralized digital coordination allowed central platforms to scale to a global reach governed by algorithmic control.

The Internet allowed large-scale quadrant one coordination systems, such as nation-states and governments, to increase their reach as they developed digital tools for the behavioral control and power pillars of coordination they had pioneered and perfected in quadrant 1.

Simultaneously, the Internet birthed Quadrant 4: decentralized cloud-based coordination and brought about the age of distributed systems. These coordination systems use decentralized technologies like peer-to-peer networks, Open source licensing, and decentralized social media facilitating coordination systems prioritizing:

• Knowledge and Understanding: open access to information and collaborative knowledge creation
• Social connection and identity: community formation based on shared interests and values
• Creation and self-expression: all empowering individuals to create, share, and innovate without the limitations

However, a fundamental problem arose with many of these open-source, decentralized, and P2P networks and could not be solved until recently.

The Freeloader Problem

The core problem is that social dynamics play out in a P2P voluntary contribution-based environment in that a few contributors uphold and support the majority of the output. Such negative social dynamics are harmful when addressing scale, governance, and anti-fragility.

Although Quadrant 4 existed and was active, as demonstrated by Open Source Development, its scale and the failures in its incentive structure capped the scale. The technological innovation of Bitcoin allowed these networks to strike a unique balance of scale and resilience for Quadrant 4 coordination systems.

Bitcoin was able to align multiple incentive structures to a substantial degree rather than the previous limit of two:

• Survival and Prosperity
• Knowledge & Understanding
• Social Connection and Identity

While some participants in the coordination system only aligned with one or two incentives, many were aligned with all three, making this the first Quadrant 4 coordination system that allowed for incredible scale by widening the net of potential participants.

The Future State(s)

Network States offer a radical new model for decentralized governance. With both decentralized systems and crypto-economics, this new coordination platform has the potential to disrupt the oldest, longest enduring, and most significant scale Quadrant 1 coordination system in existence, The Nation State.

A true disciple of its predecessor, Bitcoin, the network proposes the audacious goal of creating digital-first, decentralized governance—voluntary, privacy-preserving, cloud-first—a distributed nation-state—a global coordination system without centralization. It is an experiment of imagination with no ceiling.

Amid all this, Bitcoin's early proclamations of initiating an internet-first, decentralized, pseudonymous currency backed by energy, cryptography, and mathematics (rather than State power, influence, and military - in the case of the dollar) were protective in its infancy. The Network State's goal of creating an involuntary, privacy-preserving, cloud-first distributed network state also protectively insulates itself through its (misguided) dismissal.

The alignment of its supporters and residents on the axes of:

• Survival and Prosperity
• Knowledge and Understanding
• Power and Control
• Social Connection and Identity
• Creation and Self-Expression

Network States create an unseen incentive structure and strength of alignment in their community. Distributed across global nodes, the ephemeral nature primarily in the cloud protects the idea until it reaches the scale necessary to compete with the Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 systems of coordination systems which it seeks to obsolete.

This novel form of coordination enables participants an immediate digital exit (while maintaining physical presence), returning the paradigm of nation-states to that of a service provider that offers goods and services to its citizens in exchange for citizen-level duties rather than an entity of capture and hostage dynamics through shutting down routes leaving only loyalty as a forced choice for the captive citizenry.

It provides people an option while establishing a market in the monopoly of land-tethered states. But, perhaps most importantly, Network States provide a platform for anyone to attempt to do the same.

This new paradigm represents the beginning of a meta-quadrant approach, a new type of coordination system with cross-quadrant characteristics - Evolving beyond Quadrant IV, blending attributes of multiple quadrants.

For instance, while primarily digital, cloud-based, and decentralized, Network States may incorporate centralized elements for specific functions, creating a hybrid model. These functions may include dispute resolution, external diplomacy, land purchase, and maintenance. Unlike traditional quadrants, which remain relatively static in their coordination methods, network states may enable a more dynamic approach, allowing communities to switch between coordination strategies based on context.

As AI and machine learning technologies advance, this new state could be free to experiment with semi-automatic autonomous governing structures, where AI plays a more significant role in decision-making. This leads to an evolution of this new future state.

Managing digital and physical coordination, influencing how people organize and coordinate in the physical reality through autonomous zones, privacy-preserving regenerative intelligent cities, and maintaining a digital-first governance approach. A vision of some version of ‘Solarpunk Utopia,’ grounded in a stepwise, pragmatic, viable approach.

As these future states evolve, reputation-based systems will become a primary mechanism for governance, where individuals' roles and influences are determined by their contributions and trustworthiness. The goal is to create a more inclusive and equitable society where people can have a more inclusive and equitable experience within the community rather than solely based on financial contributions, status, and hierarchical position.

This new experiment is on the bleeding edge of driving future coordination models. Network States, by experimenting with new governance mechanisms, are likely to push the boundaries of what's possible in coordination. Potentially, and likely, leading to the emergence of entirely new paradigms. A social organization extending beyond current decentralized frameworks. A blend of technology, idealism, and pragmatic agency driving a societal revolution without violence. An optimistic future we should all be driven to coordinate around.