I’ve heard a lot about Network States and the joy of joining a like minded group of people with common goals. To me, the current talk around networks sounds more like religion than statecraft.

It’s great to feel the warmth of being part of a collective, but there’s also nothing like social punishment of falling out of favor with a collective. People can be harsh and unfair, especially when they’re surrounded by a like-minded people who judge and simplify the world in the same way.

Instead of moving backward from the innovations of the secular state to the hive mind of religion, I think we should move forward into something totally different.

Something that takes all of our knowledge of the history of politics, religion, and human biology into account to build something which improves how people make decisions and manage resources together.

Below I will start in the middle, and discuss a potential ruleset for a thing I’m calling a “civilization trust graph”. But first, what is it?

It’s a graph of nodes that shows the “trust” linkages between individuals in a civilization. Trust flows in one direction and trust is transitive. There can be no loops in the graph -- you can’t trust someone who trusts you at the same time.

The goal is to identify the most trusted people in a civilization and give them the reigns to solve problems -- to create law, to create budgets, establish taxes, and to lead.

In order to prevent fraud and coups, the history of delegations needs to be recorded on a blockchain ledger maintained by citizen-owned nodes. In real time, any citizen could view independent public data sources to see who is currently powerful.

This system also needs sybil resistant identity. That is, it shouldn’t be possible for someone to make fake citizens to get more votes.

The greatest check on power in this system is that at any moment, delegates may revoke trust and become active “politicians” themselves. All at once, a revocation takes influence away from a powerful person and gives them another voice to contend with during deliberation.

Such a system was never possible before advanced communication and record keeping technology like the internet and blockchain ledgers. But now that it is, it’s time to start thinking about the future of ultra-efficient, ultra-representative governments.

Governments where every participant is either a delegate contributing trust to others to make governance more efficient, or a politician in potential ready to create righteous debate to oppose bad judgement, corruption, or tyrannical behavior at a moment’s notice.

Now lets talk about the rules.

1. You only have one delegation to give, and you can change who it goes to at any time.

2. After the age of 18, you can always revoke your delegation and participate directly.

3. Until the age of 18, children delegate to their parents by default.

4. Delegation is transitive. A trusts B. B trusts C. A trusts C.

5. You can only delegate to someone who is not already in your delegation tree. You also cannot delegate to anyone in a delegation tree that has a leader with 20% of the civilization's total delegates.

6. You can have a max of 100 (Dunbar's number-ish) direct delegations. That is, only 100 people can directly delegate to you.

7. No one person can have more than 20% of all delegation power. There is a minimum level of collaboration required. No dictators.

The intention of these rules is to create an opt-in hierarchy for the decision making system of a civilization. The idea is to make government efficient and low cost by making it possible to place a small number of trusted figures in charge, while also protecting from tyranny by making power revokable.

One of the ways to encourage children is to make it so that your delegation power is increased by having them. I think this makes sense. At the age of maturity, young adults can decide to leave their delegation with their parents, being participants in social decision making themselves, or delegate to a new person entirely whose perspective they respect.

The graph is uni-directional because you can't delegate to someone who is already in your tree of delegates. If you delegate to someone in your tree who is less influential than you, then their link with you is severed, and they now take on all of your voting power. They would then have to choose a new delegate, or begin participating in the public sphere themselves.

In order to prevent populism, there should be a biology based cap on direct delegations. It is well known that humans cannot store meaningful information about more than 150 relationships. The idea is that we want to prevent people from delegating to people who they do not know well. Sometimes people become popular at scale through social movements. This can be a good thing, but it can also be mob-like. We want to prevent one person from gaining massive power by having millions of direct followers who actually know very little about their leader.

The way to gain massive influence in this system is through transitive trust. Each person may only have 100 direct delegations, but they pass on the voting power of their sub-delegates. If I have 100 direct delegations, and each of those people has 100 delegations, then I actually have 10,000 delegations. And if each of those sub-delegates has 100 followers then I actually have 1,000,000 total delegations.

The idea is, we want to elevate people who are trusted by trusted people. And why would we want this? Because it's not always easy to predict the behavior of people we look up to. We come to trust in others when we believe they have our best interests in mind.

Sometimes this means we have to suspend disbelief temporarily when they say something or take an action we don't understand or disagree with on the surface. A person trusted by 100 people with no delegates themselves may, in their judgement, choose a person to trust that their delegates wouldn't pick. Or that trusted person may choose to elevate one of his own followers, thus revoking their delegation to him and passing on all of his delegates, thereby elevating a relatively unknown but virtuous person.

We don't want dictators. We do want to minimize the number of decision makers, but we don't want just ONE decision maker. The smallest body of civilizational decision makers should always be an odd number to avoid ties and no one should be able to capture more than 33% of the total number of delegates.

The greatest check on the power of any individual in the system is that delegations are always immediately revocable in real time. A very powerful person can become powerless overnight if enough of their delegations are revoked. A very trusted person can become a very not trusted person.

We’re at the first responsible moment in history where we may have the tools to re-invent government in a way that is an improvement over the systems that came before. A system that is not democracy, and is not authoritarianism. It is both and neither.

It’s a system that elegantly uses modern communication and security tools to leverage something deeply human--trusted relationships--to get the best results for a people at scale.

Elections were just a stepping stone. This is the other side of the river.

I’ve heard a lot about Network States and the joy of joining a like minded group of people with common goals. To me, the current talk around networks sounds more like religion than statecraft.

It’s great to feel the warmth of being part of a collective, but there’s also nothing like social punishment of falling out of favor with a collective. People can be harsh and unfair, especially when they’re surrounded by a like-minded people who judge and simplify the world in the same way.

Instead of moving backward from the innovations of the secular state to the hive mind of religion, I think we should move forward into something totally different.

Something that takes all of our knowledge of the history of politics, religion, and human biology into account to build something which improves how people make decisions and manage resources together.

Below I will start in the middle, and discuss a potential ruleset for a thing I’m calling a “civilization trust graph”. But first, what is it?

It’s a graph of nodes that shows the “trust” linkages between individuals in a civilization. Trust flows in one direction and trust is transitive. There can be no loops in the graph -- you can’t trust someone who trusts you at the same time.

The goal is to identify the most trusted people in a civilization and give them the reigns to solve problems -- to create law, to create budgets, establish taxes, and to lead.

In order to prevent fraud and coups, the history of delegations needs to be recorded on a blockchain ledger maintained by citizen-owned nodes. In real time, any citizen could view independent public data sources to see who is currently powerful.

This system also needs sybil resistant identity. That is, it shouldn’t be possible for someone to make fake citizens to get more votes.

The greatest check on power in this system is that at any moment, delegates may revoke trust and become active “politicians” themselves. All at once, a revocation takes influence away from a powerful person and gives them another voice to contend with during deliberation.

Such a system was never possible before advanced communication and record keeping technology like the internet and blockchain ledgers. But now that it is, it’s time to start thinking about the future of ultra-efficient, ultra-representative governments.

Governments where every participant is either a delegate contributing trust to others to make governance more efficient, or a politician in potential ready to create righteous debate to oppose bad judgement, corruption, or tyrannical behavior at a moment’s notice.

Now lets talk about the rules.

1. You only have one delegation to give, and you can change who it goes to at any time.

2. After the age of 18, you can always revoke your delegation and participate directly.

3. Until the age of 18, children delegate to their parents by default.

4. Delegation is transitive. A trusts B. B trusts C. A trusts C.

5. You can only delegate to someone who is not already in your delegation tree. You also cannot delegate to anyone in a delegation tree that has a leader with 20% of the civilization's total delegates.

6. You can have a max of 100 (Dunbar's number-ish) direct delegations. That is, only 100 people can directly delegate to you.

7. No one person can have more than 20% of all delegation power. There is a minimum level of collaboration required. No dictators.

The intention of these rules is to create an opt-in hierarchy for the decision making system of a civilization. The idea is to make government efficient and low cost by making it possible to place a small number of trusted figures in charge, while also protecting from tyranny by making power revokable.

One of the ways to encourage children is to make it so that your delegation power is increased by having them. I think this makes sense. At the age of maturity, young adults can decide to leave their delegation with their parents, being participants in social decision making themselves, or delegate to a new person entirely whose perspective they respect.

The graph is uni-directional because you can't delegate to someone who is already in your tree of delegates. If you delegate to someone in your tree who is less influential than you, then their link with you is severed, and they now take on all of your voting power. They would then have to choose a new delegate, or begin participating in the public sphere themselves.

In order to prevent populism, there should be a biology based cap on direct delegations. It is well known that humans cannot store meaningful information about more than 150 relationships. The idea is that we want to prevent people from delegating to people who they do not know well. Sometimes people become popular at scale through social movements. This can be a good thing, but it can also be mob-like. We want to prevent one person from gaining massive power by having millions of direct followers who actually know very little about their leader.

The way to gain massive influence in this system is through transitive trust. Each person may only have 100 direct delegations, but they pass on the voting power of their sub-delegates. If I have 100 direct delegations, and each of those people has 100 delegations, then I actually have 10,000 delegations. And if each of those sub-delegates has 100 followers then I actually have 1,000,000 total delegations.

The idea is, we want to elevate people who are trusted by trusted people. And why would we want this? Because it's not always easy to predict the behavior of people we look up to. We come to trust in others when we believe they have our best interests in mind.

Sometimes this means we have to suspend disbelief temporarily when they say something or take an action we don't understand or disagree with on the surface. A person trusted by 100 people with no delegates themselves may, in their judgement, choose a person to trust that their delegates wouldn't pick. Or that trusted person may choose to elevate one of his own followers, thus revoking their delegation to him and passing on all of his delegates, thereby elevating a relatively unknown but virtuous person.

We don't want dictators. We do want to minimize the number of decision makers, but we don't want just ONE decision maker. The smallest body of civilizational decision makers should always be an odd number to avoid ties and no one should be able to capture more than 33% of the total number of delegates.

The greatest check on the power of any individual in the system is that delegations are always immediately revocable in real time. A very powerful person can become powerless overnight if enough of their delegations are revoked. A very trusted person can become a very not trusted person.

We’re at the first responsible moment in history where we may have the tools to re-invent government in a way that is an improvement over the systems that came before. A system that is not democracy, and is not authoritarianism. It is both and neither.

It’s a system that elegantly uses modern communication and security tools to leverage something deeply human--trusted relationships--to get the best results for a people at scale.

Elections were just a stepping stone. This is the other side of the river.