(2022-04-30) Baschez Twitter As A City State

Nathan Baschez: Twitter as a City-State. Epistemic status: wildly speculative... Is Twitter a regular company? Or is it, as Jack Dorsey and many others believe, more like a public utility? (cf Musk Buys Twitter)

I don’t think ‘public utility’ is the most useful metaphor to understand what Twitter and its peers actually are.

Public utilities make sense when the product is a simple commodity, essential for everyday life, and delivered through a set of pipes that are incredibly expensive to install and maintain

But just because Twitter isn’t much like a public utility doesn’t mean it’s a normal company, either.

I think the internet is more like land. In this metaphor:
URLs ~= Places
Links ~= Roads
Networks ~= City-states

The big difference between physical space and cyberspace is that in cyberspace you can teleport.

frictionless transit has its downsides: unlike the physical frontier, which has pretty good lock-in once you get there, it’s much harder to convince people to stay in new places

Of course the ‘internet as land’ metaphor is not new: the idea of cyber ‘space’ has been around as long as the internet

But to project internet activity onto a set of coordinates in 3D space is missing the point of the “internet as land” metaphor.

What’s new in what I’m proposing, I think, is the idea that the important thing isn’t to copy the physical properties of meatspace—it’s to use meatspace principles to inform how we govern thoughtspace.

then what form of governance is appropriate? Probably not the autocracies we live with today. Most people probably want rulers to be bound by law, enforced by an impartial judiciary, and shaped by democratic legislative principles. But how?

it’s been more common for people to reform the power structures that govern their territory, rather than seek out new territory altogether

Britain had the Magna Carta, France had the Declaration of The Rights of Man and of the Citizen, ancient Rome had the Twelve Tables. In each case, rulers lost the confidence of the ruled, and were forced to accept limitations on their power.

It’s a long shot, but I wouldn’t be surprised if future historians include the charter that established Facebook’s Oversight Board—basically their version of a Supreme Court—in the same category of documents.

Another parallel: just as in physical territory, online territory starts out as default autocratic, then only can become democratic through revolt, revolution, and reform.

That being said, there are limits to the metaphor. It would be a huge mistake to copy/paste our obviously flawed forms of democracy onto online spaces.

How should network city-states democratize, then?

There are three core jobs-to-be-done of a democracy:
Ensure everyone is equally subject to and protected by the law (judicial)
Allow everyone to influence the law (legislative)
Elect leaders to enforce the laws and operate the public infrastructure (executive)

I don’t have concrete proposals yet for how I think digital land should be governed

First, we need to shift the metaphors

In 1980 an incredible book was published called Metaphors We Live By. (George Lakkoff)

different metaphors produce different behavior, which produces different results, some more desirable than others.