Personal principles of societal organization

In War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empire (2005), author Peter Turchin proposes a theory of history, that the rise and fall of empire can be explained by a society’s capacity for cooperation. Social capital as a prerequisite for society is further explored in other books.

The interesting point is what basis a society may have for generating social capital and cooperation. Historically, Turchin argues, societies self-defined and self-unified along meta-ethnic frontiers. In an enlightened society, presumably the definition of self/other based on ethnicity and geography recedes over time in favor of ideology. The new ideologies could be much more personal and granular than the wide-reaching religions, economic systems, and political doctrines unifying disparate peoples today.

A shift to group-identification by personal principles could be liberating at the individual level but potentially destabilizing at the societal level. One issue is optimal societal size: defense and administration suggest larger societies, but personal ideologies suggest smaller groups. Another issue is greater implicit dynamism: there are fewer natural barriers to entering and leaving groups, and at-will association would seem to be the norm. A third issue is potential conflicts between multiple associations, as a system inspired by Snow Crash franchulates with nation-states articulating value propositions to potential customers could develop.

At-will society: airsteading with the extropians over Williamsburg Brooklyn today and the immortalists in zero-G tomorrow

Future of physical proximity

Where will you live? How would concepts and norms of physical proximity evolve if cars were no longer the dominant form of transportation? How would residential areas self-organize if not laid out around the needs of cars and roads? Imagine gardens replacing driveways and roadways. What if people just walked outside of their houses or onto their apartment rooftops to alight via jetpack, smartpod or small foldable, perhaps future versions of the MIT car. At present, cities, suburbs and whole countries are structured per the space dictates of motor vehicular transportation systems.

Nanoreality or rackspace reality?
There are two obvious future scenarios. There may either be a radical mastery and use of the physical world through nanomanufacturing or a quasi-obsolescence of the physical world as people upload to digital mindfile racks and live in virtual reality. The only future demand for the physical world might be for vacationing and novelty (‘hey, let’s download into a corporeal form this weekend and check out Real Nature, even though Real Nature is sensorially dull compared to Virtual Nature’).

Work 2.0
The degree of simultaneous advances is relevant for evaluating which scenario may arise. For example, economically, must people work? What is the nature of future work? Creative and productive activity (Work 2.0) might all take place in virtual reality. Smart robots may have taken over many physical services and artificial intelligences may have taken over most knowledge work. Would people be able to do whatever work they need to from home or would there be physical proximity and transportation proximity requirements as there are now?

Portable housing and airsteading
Next-level mastery of the physical world could mean that people stay incorporeal and live in portable residential pods. Airsteading (a more flexible version of seasteading) could be the norm; docking on-demand as boats or RVs do, in different airspaces for a night or a year. Docking fees could include nanofeedstock streams and higher bandwidth more secure wifi and datastorage than that ubiquitously available on the worldnets. Mobile housing and airsteading could help fulfill the ‘warmth of the herd’ need and facilitate the intellectual capital congregation possibilities that cities have afforded since the early days of human civilization.