Nation State Size, Startup Speed
tl;dr: decentralized agility at scale.
I’ve been contemplating the impact of the arrival of decentralized networks on the nation state as we know it for some time now. If you want to dive into that, see these posts:
These posts leave aside the question of the impact of Bitcoin as a potential global reserve currency and focus more on the establishment of new types of geographic independent political association that are imbued with adjudication capabilities.
I am thinking about this because I’m not alone in contemplating the impact on the political entity known as the nation state, and the latest (and greatest) contribution to this dicussion comes from Balaji Srinivasan in his post?“The Network Union.”
It’s a great read, but what caught my attention, given my?new interest in the organizations of the future?(which includes nation states) was the following:
What would it look like to have something at the scale of Facebook-the-network, or even orders of magnitude smaller, that operated as effectively as Facebook-the-company?
This is the elasticity of effectiveness that can be achieved when an organization is run as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) supported by a blockchain and smart contracts for its ‘back office’ functions. You can get the speed and agility of a nimble start up with the benefits of an aligned corporate culture.
Within these organizations, power and influence won’t be just about money (though I’m sure that will always be there) or about Kardashian type “influence,” they will more accurately reflect the value of the contribution that a given member makes to the whole.
We’ve called this “REPutation,” but Balaji calls them “backlinks.”
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As he writes:
Backlinks allow us to quantify a leader’s support base. Every leader has individuals that support them. Some of those individuals in turn have other individuals supporting them. If we treat each expression of support as a backlink, if the?asymmetric act?of merely choosing to follow someone is turned into the asymmetric act of choosing to follow their?direction,?we can summon an immediate mental visual of a digital leader’s support base. Without such a base of support a leader cannot lead. Their pronouncements will fall on deaf ears if they cannot acquire sufficient backlinks.
In other words, instead of aligning with a leader because you happen to live in a certain geographic area, you’ll align with a leader independent of geography based on how you feel about him/her.
The concept of “follow” will have much more strength, because it won’t be “I see what you write,” it will mean “when you move, I move, and when you stand still, I stand still.”
Kim Kardashian may have a lot of followers, but how many of them will vote in a certain way because she does? (Ok, maybe it’s a sadder number than I would like to contemplate).
I guess we could call it the emergence of the age of Voluntary Global Alignment instead of alignment based on a certain region of the globe.
What that will mean, or could mean, is that a global leader might one day have more weight in motivating people (and we’re already seeing this in some respects) than any national leader could imagine, because s/he’s earned it.
The volatility of politics and discourse might get (probably will) get even faster.
More to come on this as it’s still formulating in my head, as you can see.