Identity, Governance, and Radical Markets

I listened to a recent Venture Stories podcast. The host, Erik Torenberg, interviewed Balaji S. Srinivasan, angel investor and entrepreneur, and Glen Weyl, economist, Principal Researcher at Microsoft, and author of Radical Markets.

Over about 75 minutes, they discussed identity, governance, and radical markets, among other topics. They agreed and disagreed. Regardless, the conversation led me to the acquisition of new knowledge encompassing mathematical relationships, territory, history, and much more. Below are some exciting ideas that I found particularly thought-provoking:

• It will become meaningless to have geographic nation-states. It might be more useful for an opt-in so people can subscribe to different nation-state services to negotiate terms in which members interact and vote with each other. There will soon be a greater emphasis on communities and allegiances on ideological borders vs. geographic borders.
• In a sense, bitcoin may be the first private property ever. No system administrator can deprive you of it. Once one embraces the idea that the Fed and State can freeze your accounts. It’s useful to have bitcoin to protect an individual’s rights against these types of things. (Balaji also plugged a vague website at the end of the podcast that seems quite promising.)
• A technocracy is a narrow group of technical people trained to design a system for people to live in. Any technical system, no matter how much formal input it elicits, the language will not be expressable from the users’ input. We currently see this with bias in AI. Code is only a piece of it. Design with a democratic spirit is essential.
• As is, there are a lot of problems with voting. Voting works under minimal assumptions. A bidding system or auction might be more effective.
• New forms of identification and optionality where you aren’t just locked into one place based on territory, but affinities, shared beliefs, and interests — a community of people who are collectively exercising one voice. Exit amplifies voice. Coordinated exit and crowd choice are enabled by technology.
• Social networks and cryptocurrency are going to cause unbundling and rebundling of nation-states.
• Nation-states haven’t been good at serving its citizens as corporations serve customers. It’s hard to find a scaled e-commerce marketplace or any service where humans interact where there isn’t a form of reputation or reviews. Tech giants have become competent in setting up rules and managing their customers.
• A big frontier is smart contracts via crypto.
• What is the role of a nation-state in the future? In the near-term, examples could be data governance, historic preservation, and environment features. But, there is almost no area where the nation-state is the optimal governance entity.
• Criminals break the rules to destroy; entrepreneurs break the rules to build. Paths for leaders is essential, but also citizens who don’t want to take that level of risk. There need to be choices for both tracks.
• Scale is becoming a disadvantage this century, where it was an advantage last century. Very hard for empires to lead populations of people in this century. One exception is China, but for the most part, scale causes misalignment.
• Empires wipe away information that could have been built up from more bottom-up type processes. What we want as much as possible is a network of networks that builds from the bottom up that has rich information rather than a single system that imposes itself.

These are just my top takeaways. I encourage you to check it out for yourself and let me know what nuggets of information you get from the episode in the comments below.