On the “Pattern” of Digital City-State

Author: Hu Yilin

Hu Yilin, formerly an associate professor of the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University. He is currently a free scholar, the initiator of CNDAO, and the founder of TIANYU ARTech Studio.

Today I chatted with Baiyu from SeeDAO for a while and shared my ideas about the construction of a digital city-state. My focus is still to carry forward Arendt's ideas and rebuild the "public sphere" in the digital age.

SeeDAO's ideal is to build a "digital city-state of 1 million Web3 nomads". My complaint is: the number of 1 million is not big enough, but it is not small enough. Not big enough means that if Web3 is the general trend, then the future "Web3 nomads" cannot be only 1 million. The Chinese alone must be counted in the hundreds of millions, and there should be at least 10 million. Not small enough means that, as far as a "city-state" is concerned, there should not be so many people. The city-state of Athens had only a few hundred thousand people, including slaves, and generally speaking, the number of Greek city-states was between a few thousand and tens of thousands.

I have always believed that living in the digital world will become a more focused lifestyle in the future (in a sense, it is already the case now). So in a sense, everyone will be a "digital nomad" and have the desire to find a home to settle in the digital world.

But this "city-state" that settles personal identity in the digital world can be a "small country with few people" state, and it does not require millions of people to squeeze into the same "square" to act together. The city-state system in Greece, or the feudal system in medieval Europe or the Spring and Autumn Period in China, can support the independent existence of "small countries" to a certain extent. But the environment that is favorable to small countries is short-lived. The ancient water conservancy technology (the theory of Eastern despotism), the modern gunpowder industry (the theory of gunpowder empire), and the modern industrial system have all promoted the prosperity of "big countries". But these environments that help big countries squeeze small countries no longer exist in the digital world. In the digital world, small communities will not face the crisis of extinction. As long as there is a consensus, a small group of people can always maintain their own territory in the digital space.

So in the future, ideal, rich and diverse Web3 world, I believe that there will be countless DAOs, countless city-states or empires, tribes and other organizational forms coexisting, and each network country can have its own political system and operating norms. History has proved that the state of small countries standing side by side and a hundred schools of thought contending can best promote the prosperity of thought and creation.

So, in terms of the rules of interpersonal relationships such as politics, culture, and law, there is no need to design a stereotyped plan to accommodate 1 million people. But the entire digital world still needs to establish some lower-level consensus. For example, blockchain itself is a consensus at the level of creation, providing the basis for "economic activities" in the digital world.

What to do next? My idea is that we need to build some "terrain" in this world.

From a large scale, the hilly terrain and multi-island sea environment of ancient Greece promoted the development of the city-state system. Corresponding to the digital world, we may have a space that is conducive to the new city-state system, but we may also have a space that is more conducive to the new empire system. This bias can be built in some underlying consensus. For example, I do not appreciate Ethereum's switch to the PoS mechanism. The PoS mechanism ensures that large households can "eat the mountain without running out of money", which is conducive to large households retaining their status for generations. In other words, the underlying environment of PoS is more conducive to the growth of hereditary aristocracy or capital oligarchy. This does not mean that the future Ethereum world will definitely form such a system. Of course, there will be various accidents or games to determine the future fate, but the underlying environment always provides a certain bias. Bitcoin's PoW mechanism is closer to liberalism, but it is not perfect. It may strengthen the connection between the digital world and the physical world and strengthen the power of energy monopolists. Although I prefer Bitcoin, I think the digital world where Bitcoin and Ethereum compete with each other is better than the world with only Bitcoin. Perhaps neither of them is enough, and the more different "terrains", the better. Anyway, the "vagrants" in the digital world can easily move freely. Even if I think some terrains are bad, there is no need to erase them. It is always a good thing to have more choices.

On a small scale, "terrain" includes the boundary between the private sphere and the public sphere. In the ancient Greek city-state, there was a very clear boundary between the private sphere and the public sphere - your home. Inside the house, you are in the private sphere, everything inside can be kept secret from the outside, the internal rules can be unequal (parents discipline their children), and the affairs within the family are focused on what Arendt called "necessity" - that is, solving the problems of eating, drinking, defecating, sleeping, cleaning, food, clothing, reproduction, etc. that humans as animals must deal with. This part of the affairs is tedious and can never be handled. If you are full today, you have to think about what to eat tomorrow. So you can't wait until you "completely solve the problem of necessity" before stepping out of the house to pursue other affairs, especially those that are higher than animals and belong exclusively to humans. So the door of the house is a boundary. Going out means that I have "temporarily put aside" my animal needs and entered another space. In this space, what I care most about is not what to eat tomorrow, but those things that animals cannot care about, but only humans think are worth pursuing. This is what Arendt calls "action" (sometimes "work" also belongs to this category, but "labor" does not belong to this field) - for the Greeks, it is all kinds of activities that pursue "excellence": excellent athletes, excellent drama actors, excellent politicians, excellent wise men, excellent warriors... The excellence of these people is not measured by how much food they provide, but is measured by everyone in the public domain.

And this boundary between the public domain and the private domain has been eliminated in modern society (Arendt's so-called labor society). People enter the so-called public space and are still concerned about the "necessary problem" - noble people always care about the "food and clothing" of others, while vulgar people like to care about the desires related to "reproduction". In short, the necessary needs of animals have entered the public space and become the main topic of so-called "politics". Therefore, Aristotle's "home economics" became the "economics" (etymology) of later generations, and the issues that were originally concerned within the family became public issues for the whole society. But the problem is that such inevitable issues can never be completely resolved, so people will never have the time to pursue those human affairs that transcend animals. People who are committed to these transcendental affairs have to be sneaky. When others ask "Can you make a living by doing this?", they always seem to be in the wrong, and can only use "I can make some money" as an excuse.

Many people like to say things like "How can you do art without eating?", trying to put the meaning of "eating" above art, philosophy and other fields (the reason why it rarely overrides "science" is just because they think science can help people get full). But the "necessity" of eating proves that the meaning of eating is the "lowest" and the first to be shelved. Putting things aside is not giving up. It does not mean that the creators who pursue art give up eating. Rather, it means that they can draw a clear line - only within a certain line can we discuss the issue of eating, and after going beyond this line, we can put the issue of eating aside. I gave a personal example in a cafe: I have to go home to take care of my children, and my children are very important to me, but when I am chatting in a cafe, I must temporarily put my children aside and focus on the public issues being discussed. If my child is crying beside me during the discussion, your lover is acting like a spoiled child beside you, and his parents are cooking in the back, then our discussion will be very bad. So we need to find a space like a cafe, which is both open and relatively closed. Open means that anyone can come in, but closed means that it must temporarily isolate the noisy, chaotic, and never-cleared affairs outside.

I admire Arendt because I see that in the future digital world, the lost and distorted "public sphere" may be revived in a new look. For example, when we "go online", we naturally get rid of the "necessary domain" and the animal body, so we can pursue spiritual values ​​with confidence. This is not so much the ideal of Web3.0 as it is the old story of Web0.3. When the Internet was just emerging, hacker culture was the absolute mainstream. Programmers shared their creations without asking for compensation, not seeking profit but fame. Hackers pursued excellence, competed with each other, respected each other, and communicated selflessly. In that era, the young Bill Gates who called for "making money by programming" was an outlier. The mainstream culture of the Web0.3 era was partially inherited by the later open source community, but more netizens who paid attention to the affairs of necessity poured into the Internet. Therefore, in the Web2.0 era, the nature of the Internet as a public domain has degenerated again. One of the great significances of Web3 is to "rebuild the threshold", divide the boundaries within the digital world through new technologies, and promote the formation of public space.

Public space is not a huge space of iron plate, but is also composed of small spaces that are both open and closed. For example, cafes, streets, and classrooms are all public spaces, each with different thresholds and degrees of closure. Small circles formed based on Web3 identity authentication can also be public spaces with different thresholds and styles.

These public spaces can have countless styles, for example, cafes can have countless styles. But they can also have several basic forms, which we can also find references in Greek city-states. Specifically, the "topography" we are talking about also refers to the internal structure of the "city-state". Finally, I thought of another word - "pattern". Countless Greek city-states have their own characteristics, but there are some basic "patterns" that are unified. For example:

The Town Hallis the highest citizen parliament, where the most serious public affairs are generally discussed, various proposals and debates are initiated here, and differences are resolved by voting. In the digital world, it is the core parliament of DAO.

The Market (Agora, also a square) is a more open space where serious debates can take place, but also general chats can take place. People can also sell ideas and goods here. In the digital world, it is the NFT market plus the public social page.

Templeis also a space in Greek city-states, but it is more inclined to cultural and artistic content, often with high-end clergy stationed there to provide questions and answers (oracle, interpretation of divination), and also play the role of a public

in the digital world, it can be AMA and sermons, treasury and resource library, etc.

stadiumis a competitive stage for the pursuit of excellence, where people compete with each other in many non-utilitarian games, competing for the highest honor of the Olympics.

in the digital world, it is "games" and their communities. In addition, the gymnasium was also an important place for Greek citizens to receive education. The wise men taught knowledge in their spare time while exercising. Therefore, school was developed from the meaning of leisure. Later, Plato's Academy was also established on the basis of the gymnasium. Games and learning are isomorphic, which is also in line with the concept of gamified learning in deschool.

Theaterprovides public entertainment and public talk, and also chases "stars" to meet the social needs of entertainment and gossip. Benchmarking the entertainment industry and its community in the digital world.

The spring roomis a public bath, where people take off their secular identities, meet each other frankly, and may talk about more vulgar topics. Benchmarking in the digital world is an anonymous community.

In short, to build a digital city-state, we can design basic rules on the "underlying environment". The key is to provide "topographic separation", or environmental "pattern". Public space and private space should be separated, and public spaces of different styles should also be separated. Different DAOs may have different focuses, but the overall separation standards may be common and worthy of our construction first.

Original link: https://yilinhut.net/2023/05/12/9252.html