Decline of the Nation-State in an Era of Shared Transnational Values
Discussion
Alice Maz:
"The nation-state commanded loyalty from people on the basis of born membership in a particular group, and these groups were considered discrete entities with no overlap. The future of the state in the 21st century is unlikely to be the bastion of a nation, the sole protector of the national people, demanding absolute loyalty and immense sacrifice. Instead, the state is more likely to take the form of a service provider, competing with other states and non-state entities in the market. This prospect is frightening to nationalists, especially since they take the nation-state to be fundamentally natural and eternal, after two centuries of mythology to that effect necessary to organize and make use of people on the scale of tens of millions.
However, they are in the minority. The blame for this can largely be placed on the states themselves, who created immense suffering for their subject populations, none of whom emerged unscathed from the world wars. Even this was not enough to break the compact, and most populations who participated in the wars enjoyed rapid economic growth, compression of economic inequality, and the solidarity that comes from rebuilding. But since the 1970s, all of these trends have reversed. The situation now is that the masses feel betrayed: they did their duty, fulfilled their side of the obligation, only to see themselves neglected and taken advantage of by states that no longer provide broad-based prosperity.
As a result, from poor to rich, it is increasingly common to view the relationship with one's state as a simple cost/benefit calculation, rather than a sacred duty. This is entirely in line with the medieval attitude, and probably far more common in history than lofty ideals of civic obligation. People are far more likely to identify with loyalties that are more local, more personal, or explicitly opted into. Fundamentally this means self-identification, alignment on important questions of worldview, access to secret knowledge that outsiders are not privy to, mission, and purpose.
The state is not going away, and states are certain to remain among the most powerful institutions in the marketplace for people to choose where to throw their lot. But states will need to adjust to a world where loyalty is an exchange of value rather than a demand imposed by force.
Many people feel as much, if not more, investment in the politics and affairs of countries other than their own, on the basis of ideological solidarity and ingroup feeling with those of similar affections. This is not entirely new, as demonstrated by colonial officials going native, and foreign fighters in liberation wars, but they were oddities in the past, with real skin in the game, whereas now it is a fairly commonplace affectation. "Solidarity" of the Communist-Internationalist variety is now a feature of virtually every political bloc, and people scattered across the world of a common political bent often have a deeper sense of shared values with each other than with their countrymen in the opposition.
Aside from politics, one of the leading bastions of shared transnational values, which will be a model for many imitators to come, is tech. There are, to be sure, many people who want to emigrate to America for economic opportunity, and many who feel aligned with its history and political culture, and would likely be more nationalistic than most native-born. However there is a notable segment whose chief identification is with the American tech industry specifically. The United States as a political entity is fractious, confused, burning treasure and legitimacy. The idea that it is in decline, once fringe, is now taken for granted, and the chief question of politics on both sides is how to arrest or reverse that.
Tech culture—for lack of a better word for a set of beliefs and shared touchstones that transcend the professions and locations that spawned it—has a strong sense of shared mission and purpose. It is aspirational, optimistic, pluralistic, and transnational. While the typical western government won't let you open an ice cream stand without a license, tech culture will give you a couple million dollars for a good pitch deck, just in case you can succeed. Successful burghers and industrialists sought to join their nations' ruling classes, whereas successful techies seek to coopt or replace them. Increasingly the milieu finds itself more willing to fund life sciences, quasi-religions, humanities work, community-building, and the arts, broadening its circle beyond the core professional class that it came from, and becoming more of a gathering point for all people of specific sympathies.
In short, tech culture has a positive vision of what the future ought to be like, is an attractive destination for the young and ambitious, and despite internal division over questions of national politics, remains more intact and aligned than national populations at large. This is the kind of ethos that can command loyalty in the future, of a form that more closely resembles medieval favor-trading than modern blood and soil. There is much to criticize about tech culture itself, but the point is not that "tech" per se is the future. Merely, "tech" is the first successful model of a decentralized, transnational culture in the present era that is capable of truly superseding national loyalties and fostering collective feeling among members who acculturate to it by choice. This model is what will wax, and many more instances of it, with radically different values and practices, will emerge in the coming decades."
(https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/neomedievalism-and-transnational)
The Neomedieval Invisible Colleges of the Present and Future Digital Age
Alice Maz:
"There are three classes of people who will be able to navigate the electronic age. Some will become hardened to everything, impassive rocks in a raging ocean. They will check out and focus on other things like work, family, hobbies, or pet interests where they can thoroughly vet everything they consume. Others will be captured by ideas that are relatively benign, establishing a mutualistic relationship where these memeplexes rely on them to spread but protect them from more insidious ones. And finally, some people, with a deep sense of their core values, along with mission and purpose, will seek each other out and organize on the basis of their shared vision of reality to accomplish great things.
This is very much similar to the medieval situation, with an added layer of self-awareness. While the peasantry was checked out because they had no stake in their society, the information-immune will check out as a defensive measure, and be unable to meaningfully participate in it, except possibly as members of craft guilds who keep to themselves except when selling to market. This is not necessarily a bad thing, considering the history of mass politics. As long as they can be provided for, and in exchange made economically useful, this is an acceptable arrangement for both sides.
The benignly infected will be fervent monks, and some enlightened laity. And if we assume going insane has a negative effect on your ability to live a good and healthy life, eventually the benign beliefs will outcompete the destructive ones, in the same way that a virus which quickly kills its host cannot spread. These people will develop heuristics for staying grounded and content in a hostile world, and after some generations arrive at a process to cultivate those beliefs and transmit them to their children. This will form the basis of future world religions, whether they evolve from present ones or are invented de novo. Practitioners in our lifetimes will look like wild mystics, but the core principles they discover will later have their esoteric practices sanded off to be made safe for public consumption. It will only be possible to distinguish the benign from the malignant in hindsight.
Those who gather and organize to inscribe their visions on the world will form the bedrock of new societies. They will be united by shared worldviews in much the same way as nation-states once were, but they will come from across the globe and choose their affiliations for themselves. This mechanism is fully robust against the breakdown of consensus reality, because for them, is no consensus to enforce. It is entered into willingly, with full knowledge of alternatives, and as a result will enable even smoother coordination than the era of mass politics, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Much like the monks, their associations will be cults, but less like esoteric religions and more like secret societies or fraternal organizations. The best of them will cut across professions, forming microcosmic societies that interface with the broader world in a radically different way from how they deal with each other internally. With superior networks, shared purpose, and implicit trust, they will be able to amass class resources; though their membership may come from any economic stratum, they will be able to raise up their poorer members and cultivate shared prosperity.
Eventually it will be members of these groups that build the platforms that filter and guide information, merely to automate their own preferences and offload work to the machines. Someday those platforms will be pointed at the masses, first to guide and protect them, but eventually to yoke them, and entrench a superior class in power that it no longer deserves to wield."
(https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/neomedievalism-and-transnational)