[ epistemic status: a small slice of my model, likely misleading because it’s not part of a much larger discussion. It’s a mistake to engage with most political/philosophical discussions from Hacker News, but that won’t stop me! ]
Technophiles (and really, most groups who want status to track intellectual prowess) have a weird and inconsistent relationship with governments. They desperately seek government as an entity that can solve the hard/impossible problems of massive populations of humans who want stuff that’s not consistent with what the technophiles (or other intellectuals) want for them. They often call this “coordination problems”, rather than the more accurate “conflicting misalignment of values and desires problem”.
At the same time, they see the clear costs, limits, and inefficiencies of government action in the real world, where government decisions are NOT made by the preferred elite (technophiles themselves), but by the masses, or by a different profile of elites. This obviously gets worse as the government gets bigger and more distant, in part because bigger means “less capturable by my preferred mechanisms”.
This makes it obvious that the best government is a loose federation of smaller, local (or even domain-specific) governments, which can be controlled easily by the “correct” elite. Ideally, the federation does minimially-intrusive enforcement of exactly the correct property rights in order to prevent violence that threatens the privilege of the controllers of smaller governments. “maintain order” in both the “prevent violence” and “prevent significant change of order” senses.
[ epistemic status: a small slice of my model, likely misleading because it’s not part of a much larger discussion. It’s a mistake to engage with most political/philosophical discussions from Hacker News, but that won’t stop me! ]
Technophiles (and really, most groups who want status to track intellectual prowess) have a weird and inconsistent relationship with governments. They desperately seek government as an entity that can solve the hard/impossible problems of massive populations of humans who want stuff that’s not consistent with what the technophiles (or other intellectuals) want for them. They often call this “coordination problems”, rather than the more accurate “conflicting misalignment of values and desires problem”.
At the same time, they see the clear costs, limits, and inefficiencies of government action in the real world, where government decisions are NOT made by the preferred elite (technophiles themselves), but by the masses, or by a different profile of elites. This obviously gets worse as the government gets bigger and more distant, in part because bigger means “less capturable by my preferred mechanisms”.
This makes it obvious that the best government is a loose federation of smaller, local (or even domain-specific) governments, which can be controlled easily by the “correct” elite. Ideally, the federation does minimially-intrusive enforcement of exactly the correct property rights in order to prevent violence that threatens the privilege of the controllers of smaller governments. “maintain order” in both the “prevent violence” and “prevent significant change of order” senses.