CommunityMayNotScale/Talk

NathanielThurston -- Thu Sep 17 10:28:33 2009

My thinking about the TeaTime project has paid one dividend: I have an abundance of ideas about solutions to CommunityMayNotScale, which have survived an extensive and rigorous winnowing process within my mind. Three things seem clear to me:

It would be more appropriate to call a successfully-scaled community a society.
MoneyAndCommunity: In any society, some sort of currency is a necessity. I need to state that there are many kinds of currency, only one of which is the "money" system (centrally-administered, secret, MarketEconomy?, ...) that is in almost universal use today.
LiquidityOfTrust: For a society to be beautiful, many different kinds of trust must be at least as liquid as is power, by which I mean that the various kinds of trust must flow freely from community to community.

The reasoning is simple: In a society, currency is necessary due to the connected graph squaring problem; and effective cooperation is only sustainable when SoftSecurity has more power than HardSecurity.