Essential skills for Citizen 2.0
Essential skills for Citizen 2.0
How citizens building the future will excel at economic sovereignty, jurisdictional optionality, and coordination both local and global
How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I will (1) study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, (2) highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and (3) present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.
“Social mobilization is one important key to breaking out of the dysfunctional equilibria represented by traditional elites locked in rent-seeking coalitions. The Danish king was able to undermine the power of the entrenched aristocracy in the 1780’s because of the emergence of an educated, well-organized peasantry - something new in world history.”
-Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
I woke up this morning at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep. With nothing to do, I decided to finish the Origins of Political Order and outline my final essay for the book. As I closed the book my attention was drawn to two recurring concepts. One is that we need a new kind of citizen. We need to develop a kind of citizen that understands autonomy and sovereignty along with being skilled in coordination both at the local and global level. The other is that we need a new kind of institution. We need institutions that receive performance feedback from both internal actors and end users (often citizens) and receives rewards and punishments for that performance. I’ll address the first in this essay and will hopefully get around to the second in the future.
I believe this new kind of Citizen, let’s call her Citizen 2.0, will have skills that allow her to be both more autonomous and more collectively powerful than current citizens who are often disengaged, misinformed, and government-dependent.
These new skills will be hard-won, like reading in the quote above. Consider the amount of effort we put into teaching our children to read. Despite it being extremely labor intensive and repetitive, everyone learns to read. And history has shown that it has made us much more powerful citizens because of our ability to sense-make together through spreading viral messages and memes, to understand, replicate, modify and pass on ideas. Literacy provided the conditions for a step-change in citizen power and quality of life and was a precondition to democracy forming at all.
Citizen 1.0 was religious (it’s how / why they learned to read), literate and was organized at a local level. As this citizen advanced, they were able to win rights for themselves and eventually transform their own government.
The ark of the advancement of governance bends towards individuals increasingly being able to organize and affect their destiny. This has the dual benefit of creating governments that are approved of by the people - less chance of revolt; and has the benefit of using collective intelligence - the leadership is the collective result of what the majority of the population thought was best.
At the core of our governmental issues right now is our government being unresponsive. It serves the wealthy and connected and is indifferent to the preferences of the average citizen. It is no longer adaptive and therefore no longer embodies the advantages that made democracy a dominant governance system around the globe. It has been cut off from the generative source of the citizen, and is therefore in decline, everywhere.
What is Citizen 2.0 to do? To help birth the new system of citizen-centric government she will excel in at least three things: Economic sovereignty, jurisdictional optionality, and coordination both local and global. Global citizens with these qualities will not only help themselves and their social class, they will provide the needed pressures for the present system to become responsive and functional again.
Economic Sovereignty:
Citizen 2.0 will be a Bitcoiner and therefore will have wealth and freedom. This will allow her to make logical and “low time preference” decisions. This will ultimately lead to a stronger and more vigorous culture than those fueled by falling fiats (that should be the name of the Federal Reserve’s softball team).
As the economic unsustainability of the present system plays out, we can expect two things: currency devaluation and capital controls. Due to unserviceable and rapidly growing levels of debt, nation states will be forced to print more fiat money in order to fulfill their obligations. Nation states will also strengthen control over their currencies and economies through regulation so that capital doesn’t flee en masse, or go into investments that supersede their control (like Bitcoin and to some extent Crypto). Many countries will try to create a central bank digital currency with features that force fiat slaves to spend it in an allotted amount of time, surveil them, and turn off their ability to purchase certain items based on their social credit score or ESG allowance. This will heavily diminish the freedom of the average citizen both economically and intellectually (the latter is very real but much less often considered).
Citizen 2.0 must stage a resistance against such authoritarianism. Luckily Bitcoin is already composed in a way that it can be completely out of reach of authoritarian control. Bitcoin offers Citizen 2.0 distinct advantages over fiat users. Bitcoin will help the spending power of their savings grow over time, as opposed to drop as with fiat savings. This leads to changes in consumption patterns - bitcoin users only spend when they have to, knowing that holding on to their money means more purchasing power in the future. This leads to less frivolous and wasteful spending which has implications for every culture Bitcoin fuels. This eventually leads to long-term thinking and planning, in addition to sovereignty and confidence in the face of late-empire bureaucrats. A key ingredient indeed for a free culture.
Jurisdictional Optionality:
Whereas the USA was the historical obvious choice for freedom and quality of life for many, this is no longer the case. As the major economies decline and become reactionary, controlling, surveilling, and coercive, the digital economy allows for smaller nations to attract talent to them with an offer of the freedom that America once embodied. This puts pressure on existing successful states to not drive talent away, and incentivizes other nations to adopt strong property rights, transparency, and to lower corruption. If they can do this, they can attract more entrepreneurial capital than at any point in history, since the internet enables us to work from anywhere.
Citizens 2.0 will likely have multiple passports because they will value their freedom and will not tolerate jurisdictions that, when in decline, turn on their citizens. Which is often the case. This gives Citizen 2.0 control and they therefore cannot be bullied and coerced nearly as easily as citizens with no other options but to live at the mercy of the state they were born into, regardless of who is in charge. Instead they will be free to move to responsible jurisdictions where they are appreciated, and although these countries may be smaller, they will have other savvy global citizens in the future. El Salvador, with the potential for an investors residency looks to be a good early example.
Coordination both global and local:
Local coordination is important because it grounds a person socially and allows them to act where they have good information and relationships, and enables them to contribute to projects that actually affect their quality of life. Citizens 2.0 know that relationships, trust, and social and psychological health matter. And coordinating with real people, locally contribute to this. The atomized human, alone watching TV news sponsored by Pfizer, is subject to misinformation and distortions of reality, is easily manipulated, divided and controlled. The human comfortable among other humans in a network of trust and congeniality regardless of political disagreements is empowered and knows they have the resources to solve most problems right at their fingertips.
But of all these values, global coordination may be the biggest innovation. True, ideas spread around the world in the pre-internet days. But only the internet allows them to coordinate as if other global citizens were their neighbors. Coordinating globally allows Citizen 2.0 to learn directly from the experience of people of all stripes from other advanced and developing countries. Then they can leverage the group to affect their local countries. At its full scale, groups of Citizen’s 2.0 could be a new entity in the power balance of the globe not seen in history.
If you read my piece on decentralized vs authoritarian governments, you’re familiar with Fukuyama’s diagram on political power within a society.
The boxes at the top represent people who are organized and exert influence on the state. Citizen 2.0 began as a member of an “unorganized social group” no different from your average tech worker. But once they develop the ability to organize globally, they’ll be more influential than the existing groups in some ways. Most trade unions, business groups, students, NGOs, and media are focused domestically and cannot move influence and resources seamlessly around the world. But Citizen 2.0 exists and thinks globally.
In conclusion, Origins of Political Order was an informative book and I’m glad I read it. I always knew that healthy democracies require an abundance of sophisticated and organized citizens. The book gave me helpful frameworks for understanding why. Another concept that will stick with me is the essentialness of having tension, healthy tension between the state and other powerful groups, since challenges from one to the other bring about advancement, and collusion between them hastens collapse.
The next book I’ll be reporting on will be Why the West Rules — For Now by Ian Morris.
Matt Harder runs the public engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.