I’ve come to feel like it’s a red flag if such a project bills itself as a distributed state or something of the sort. There seems to be a risk that people would start such a project only to do something grand-sounding rather than solve all the concrete problems that a state solves.
I’d much rather have a bunch of highly specialized small companies that solve specific problems really well (and also don’t exclude anyone based on their location or citizenship) than one big shiney distributed state that is undeniably state-like but is just as flawed as most geographic states, because it would just add one more flawed and hard-to-coordinate actor to the international scene, and make international coordination harder rather than easier.
The ideal project here is probably something that incubates and coordinates other small projects that provide specific services to solve specific problems while not discriminating based on location or citizenship but that never uses terms like “state,” “government,” or “country” for itself.
An added benefit is that a lot of my conversations about distributed states quickly became about “Is this really a distributed state/government/country,” which is one of the least interesting conversations to have. (That’s something I’d rather leave to trained lexicographers with big corpora to figure out.) I’d much rather have conversation about whether it solves the problems it sets out to solve and at what cost.
I’ve come to feel like it’s a red flag if such a project bills itself as a distributed state or something of the sort. There seems to be a risk that people would start such a project only to do something grand-sounding rather than solve all the concrete problems that a state solves.
I’d much rather have a bunch of highly specialized small companies that solve specific problems really well (and also don’t exclude anyone based on their location or citizenship) than one big shiney distributed state that is undeniably state-like but is just as flawed as most geographic states, because it would just add one more flawed and hard-to-coordinate actor to the international scene, and make international coordination harder rather than easier.
The ideal project here is probably something that incubates and coordinates other small projects that provide specific services to solve specific problems while not discriminating based on location or citizenship but that never uses terms like “state,” “government,” or “country” for itself.
An added benefit is that a lot of my conversations about distributed states quickly became about “Is this really a distributed state/government/country,” which is one of the least interesting conversations to have. (That’s something I’d rather leave to trained lexicographers with big corpora to figure out.) I’d much rather have conversation about whether it solves the problems it sets out to solve and at what cost.