On The Other Side ep 60 - Reinventing the leviathan + learning from history w/ Jon Hillis
Primer: We have always enjoyed the reflections of Jon Hillis. In this episode of On The Other Side, he introduces the lessons he has learned from history and what led him to his thesis on the blockchain leviathan — a new type of leviathan that allows people to self-organize into capture-resistant small pods of effective coordination.
Background
Was introduced to Bitcoin in college
Was a political science and environmental studies major. Was most interested in collective action problems
Was living in a dense residential community at school
Spent 6 years at Instacart as director of product
After the pandemic hit, he followed his dream to build a cabin in the woods and bring internet people together
While sitting around a campfire in 2021, a group of them decided to start Cabin DAO, a DAO that would host a residency program and help seed their network city
Overview Of Social Contract Theory
Have been spending a lot of time trying to trace the origins of the modern political system and how we ended up here
The current political system is becoming increasingly polarized
The idea of the political left and right came from the French revolution
Started reading the political philosophers and thinkers from the Western post-enlightenment period
Hobbes wrote about the need for centralized sovereign leadership
“If you actually look at the cover of Leviathan, it's a picture that Hobbes helped design, that is literally like a giant king made out of people.”
- Jon Hillis
Rousseau’s definition of the left is built around the idea of equality and social contracts
A lot of thinking at that time was based on the historical precedents of monarchy
The philosophers lacked a combination of technology and mindset
Learning From History
Incredible amount to learn from history
There’s a tendency in DAOs to downplay history by saying our technologies are so different
People underestimate how smart people used to be and assumed a very flat version of the past
The best reason to read history is to understand how blinded by current thinking people used to be
One of the best resources is David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything
They unpacked the non-Western version of history from early river-based civilizations in Mesopotamia to pre-Westernized Americas
Thinking Within A Limited Scope
It’s hard to know when one is thinking within a limited scope
It requires somebody to shine a light on a new area
Has found that reading original texts from past eras gives us a good sense of that particular period
“I think that just putting yourself into the shoes of some of those original writings, can really help jog your own understanding of how trapped in the times people are in general, and can maybe help shed light on how we're trapped as well.”
- Jon Hillis
His Framework
As a political science major, he became disappointed about debating classic philosophical works on their own terms or trying to do statistical analyses on existing political systems
Fortunate to have a mentor who studied under Elinor Ostrom who opened his eyes to a different way of viewing political science
Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize for her essay titled Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems
The work acknowledges that humans are complex creatures with complex motivational structures and social dilemmas that do not fall within the bounds of traditional rational economic theory
Blockchain Leviathan
For Hobbes, kings are needed to be the leviathan to ensure a functioning society
In his essay, he hypothesizes that blockchains are potentially a new type of leviathan
Blockchains allow people to self-organize into capture-resistant small pods
“And so rather than needing to design governance systems at the scale of nation states or post-monarchies, we now have this toolset [blockchain] that allows for self-sovereign coordination at the scale of very small groups of people.”
- Jon Hillis
If the group wants to, they can build an independently controlled currency for the organization
The Influence Of Capitalism On Our Thinking
Heavily influenced by the existing capitalist structures
Financial use cases are the first use cases for blockchains
Thinks that the blockchain leviathan/self-sovereign governance use case is the more interesting one
A Long Term View Of Governance Structures
Might end up with a bunch of local communities playing a larger role in people’s lives
The world might grow towards what Neal Stephenson wrote in Snow Crash with Burbclaves
His hope is to use the tools and resources of our era to more fully complete the vision of the local semi-autonomous structure that defined the origin of America
Tocqueville pointed out that the important point is not the formal governance structures, but the informal associations and local groupings of people
Can Democracy Work At Scale?
He prefers small groups
As you increase the number of people, human coordination becomes more limited
“That has become really evident over the past couple of years as we've tried to build DAOs. And most of them have too many cooks in the kitchen to effectively govern themselves.”
- Jon Hillis
Solving Big Problems
Is a huge optimist
History has shown that humans have risen to the occasion to create technologies and social structures to solve big problems
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