For the purposes of a Network State, according to the author Balaji Srinivasan , there must be one, and only One Commandment, a moral innovation that sets this state apart from the existing system. It’s an appealing concept. If you just have one point of differentiation, one moral imperative, one unique selling point, as it were, you can rally enough people behind this concept and create your own digital Network State. Yet, as appealing as this concept is, it’s about as solid as the idea that you can explain all of religion by the Golden Rule. It’s a guiding principle but it’s not the whole thing. One Commandment works well enough for products and services, but it is unlikely to e adequate substance to hold an actual state together.
The evidence is in the DAOs we’re seeing today. Anyone who has participated in a DAO has presumably signed up for that one mission statement. It could be the maintenance of a stablecoin, integrity in peer-reviewed scientific research, or funding of public goods. Whatever DAO you entered, it probably didn’t take you more than a few weeks to find out that the mission statement and the culture are two completely different things—and that as a human being, the thing that keeps you involved in the DAO is the culture, not the mission statement.
It’s natural. You want to hang out with people you like, with people who have similar values, similar work ethics, and similar communications styles to yours. Otherwise, things rapidly deteriorate, or you rapidly quit the DAO. It just didn’t vibe.
It that’s the way you feel about online communities, imagine what happens when these One-Commandment groups buy properties nearby one another and create communities. Now they have to agree on a large number of mundane cultural norms such as whether to mow lawns (or allow for natural weeds and biodiverse overgrowth), recycle, build bike lanes, have shops open on Sundays, fund a fire brigade, maintain monetary policy, and establish a school curriculum for their children. All of a sudden that one moral imperative gets spread very thin. And that’s in good times.
What happens in a major crisis like a flood, spike in energy prices, or sanctions from another network state? Does your Network State have the shared values to decide what to do in these kinds of cases? Not on One Commandment, you don’t. And if that flood or famine hits one of your nodes, do all the nodes kick in to save that node? It’s not obvious that your One Commandment will keep them together. I mean, Pakistan and Bangladesh didn’t hold it together very well, with a good deal more than One Commandment to unite them.
Cultural cohesion is even more of a challenge when we are talking about digital natives—people who have, for the last 20 years, atrophied their capabilities for collaborative human actions and face-to-face social interactions. Many have no experience with any type of community belonging or ritual. In most of the world today, having enough money has substituted for the need to get along with one’s neighbors. If you are building a new nation together, money and a fierce sense of individualism aren’t going to cut it as unifying factors.
Our research into ecovillages, chamas, and community currencies shows us that the shared culture is the hardest part. As human beings we have quirks, foibles, and flaws. Shared rituals and culture have helped people over the ages unify despite their uniqueness as individuals. Whether it’s national holidays, fables, myths, harvest rituals, language, or a canonical protocol, any culture or nation that has held together for any period of time has had a rich culture of norms. Many of them are arbitrary: it isn’t particularly important whether you offer guests a coffee or a beer as a sign they are welcome in your home (or a sign that it’s time to go now). But many of the rituals are important and have survived over generations for real reasons, such as rituals for burying or cremating the deceased. Without these elaborate lists of rites, rituals, ethnic and ethical nuances, it’s impossible to have anything like a culture, nation, or community. Even when it comes to your One Commandment, there will be people who are more extreme purists and others who want to cheat on it every now and again, whether it’s veganism or monogamy. Balaji uses the example of paleo-kosher. I doubt he’s ever looked closely into those Kosher stamps to realize there are at least five of them depending on what sect you belong to.
Maybe it all works out, though, because you start with the digital online state and only those people who “vibe” buy a chunk of land together. Maybe only those people who already live in the same culture buy a piece of land together. Maybe you have a network state that truly is nothing more than one shared value, like paleo-kosher or no-till farming. It would be unprecedented, but what isn’t unprecedented these days?
At Sideways we think this approach is naive at best, and destructive at worst. People just aren’t built to live by one simple rule. As we develop the systems of the future, we could say that we do have One Commandment in terms of our guiding principle: cherishing aliveness and vitality. Yet, we know this will have multiple interpretations and implementations depending on the local cultures and needs of each physical community.
For that reason, Sideways is developing systems that are highly flexible and adapt to the different needs of cultures. Structures like the Ostrom5 are designed to let any group of organizations determine a meaningful code of conduct for holding one another to account. Perhaps each cluster in neighborhood would have a different culture but they could all agree on basic principles such as enforcing recycling, prosecuting thieves, sharing books at the library, and on what measures to take if someone violates these codes of conduct.
But of course you don’t need that, either, because those services are already provided in many places. Sideways also takes a different approach than Balaji when it comes to buildng community. You don’t necessarily need everyone to vibe together, and you don’t need to opt out of the current system. Instead, you can just have a bunch of community groups that join an Ostrom5 which enforces some additional codes of conduct, for example sharing lawnmowers and returning them in good condition, letting weeds grow so that you can restore the wildflowers, or other codes of conduct that allow groups to implement mutual aid, ecological restoration, etc. We think that these new institutions will grow alongside the existing ones, evolving together rather than requiring people to sacrifice their current services all at once.
Ostrom5 is just the first mechanism we’re developing at Sideways. We believe these mechanisms better represent a decentralized society where people have a wider range of freedoms and a wider range of reconciliation methods when disagreements appear. A family might want to associate with one group for educating their children but a different values-based group for their healthcare needs. People are funny that way. By starting with activist groups and networks of groups, we are working towards a mesh of different tools that let people develop new forms of culture and belonging, along with more complex protocols than “One Purpose.”
