I can’t but help think about how this applies not just online communities but countries.
Some countries are open and free but not safe. I’m not sure what the best example of this is today. Mexico feels pretty open and free but not particularly safe.
Some countries free and safe but not open. Japan comes to mind: pretty safe, people are pretty free, but it’s basically impossible to immigrate (at best you can live and work there long-term as an outsider).
Some countries are open and safe but not free. Places like Singapore and UAE let lots of people come from all over the world but you got to live by the comparatively restrictive local rules or you’re out.
The whole thing is complicated though because industrialization seems to offer a Pareto improvement to all three such that industrialized nations are more open, free, and safe than non-industrialized and developing countries, although this isn’t always true since industrialization also precipitated some totalitarian states that were less open, free, and safe than what came before. Maybe industrialization is just a force multiplier here but doesn’t change the underlying tradeoffs being made?
WRT industrialism: I think that the issue is a difference of where it can arise versus what you can do with it once you have it. Early industrialism needed the cultural and material milieu of England and northern Europe in order to form, and a lot of the positive developments we associate with it are in fact baseline attributes of those regions. But once it had been developed, it could be exported to regions with a different cultural and political mix, and in those places it mostly just acted as a force multiplier.
I can’t but help think about how this applies not just online communities but countries.
Some countries are open and free but not safe. I’m not sure what the best example of this is today. Mexico feels pretty open and free but not particularly safe.
Some countries free and safe but not open. Japan comes to mind: pretty safe, people are pretty free, but it’s basically impossible to immigrate (at best you can live and work there long-term as an outsider).
Some countries are open and safe but not free. Places like Singapore and UAE let lots of people come from all over the world but you got to live by the comparatively restrictive local rules or you’re out.
The whole thing is complicated though because industrialization seems to offer a Pareto improvement to all three such that industrialized nations are more open, free, and safe than non-industrialized and developing countries, although this isn’t always true since industrialization also precipitated some totalitarian states that were less open, free, and safe than what came before. Maybe industrialization is just a force multiplier here but doesn’t change the underlying tradeoffs being made?
WRT industrialism: I think that the issue is a difference of where it can arise versus what you can do with it once you have it. Early industrialism needed the cultural and material milieu of England and northern Europe in order to form, and a lot of the positive developments we associate with it are in fact baseline attributes of those regions. But once it had been developed, it could be exported to regions with a different cultural and political mix, and in those places it mostly just acted as a force multiplier.
This is very speculative, though.