I.

Today, the world has many governments, but they mostly follow a very small number of basic governance templates. Democracy in a few flavors, socialism in a few more, and not much else. In particular, we have an obsession with Democracy as the political ideology that shapes our discourse. Wikipedia even goes as far as breaking down forms of government into ‘democracy,’ ‘not democracy,’ and ‘other.’

I don’t have any particular problem with democracy per se, but I do think the typical knee-jerk reaction against any suggestion of alternatives to democracy is problematic. There are very few topics that provoke crusading the way criticizing democracy can. Usually the knee-jerkers will preach the historical failures of systems like totalitarianism, monarchism, or communism to justify democratic fervor. This religiousness stems from the fact that democratic capitalism is, at its core, a social ideology. Yes, sure, it’s our dominant social ideology —unless you happen to live in a place where it’s communism rather than democracy that dominates political discourse, but even then the same argumentative principles apply— but just because someone else votes to jump off a bridge doesn’t mean you should too.

Sapiens highlights the particular human failure mode nicely:

Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths… States are rooted in common national myths… Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths… Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

While these shared narratives have proven powerful and useful, they shouldn't keep us from entertaining new ones. In fact, it's imperative that we consider new ones.

We do not examine our governments critically the way the originators of our government did, meaning we may have a nonoptimal system that's only compounding over time. On Substack, there's been a recent uplift in stories and discussions around better futures. Writers like and the other neo-utopianists engage in a vigorous hope-punk discourse, bucking the in-vogue doom-and-gloom for something much more optimistic. Besides simply writing more of these types of stories, I see a need for more specific. The self-actualizing philosophy we’re aiming for is doing a good job of imagining worlds where we have shining solar-powered cityscapes, etc., and that's better than the maudlin, ad nauseam dystopia that has dominated today’s popular storytelling, but without the specific ‘how’ we're missing something vital.

We need to examine three things closely here: governance, contingency, and value lock-in. Hypothesizing on better forms of governance, considering the very long-term implications of not working on these better futures (i.e. better futures are very contingent on us figuring out better governance now), and the cost/opportunity of locking these values in now. It's like the saying about the tree and when to plant it. Radical change in government seems far-fetched in our modern world, but it seemed equally far-fetched to those living in the 18th century. Put another way, imagining better forms of governance now gives us a small chance of a huge future win. 

To use a recent example (in government-creation terms), the Founding Fathers of the United States, deeply inspired by the Enlightenment, drew extensively from its luminaries to form the foundational principles of American democracy.

John Locke’s ideas about natural rights and government directly influenced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, advocating for life, liberty, and property as fundamental human rights. Baron de Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws" introduced the separation of powers to prevent any branch from overpowering the others. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas on direct democracy and the social contract underscored governance's legitimacy from the people's consent.

Then there are James Harrington's and Sir Edward Coke's discussions on property, political power, and English common law. Voltaire and Cesare Beccaria’s stances on justice and religious freedom. The political ideologies of the English Whigs. The classical philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome. The list goes on.

II.

We modern humans benefit from access to all of these great thinkers -- but also suffer from a lack of popular, modern intellectual thought on government. Think about it for a minute. Even if you happen to be a hardline critic of our current democratic government, discarding the entirety of the Western political philosophy canon, what are you left with? Burke, Marx, de Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and Spengler are all men long dead. Alasdair MacIntyre, a moral philosopher critical of modern liberal democracy, is the only living thinker I can conjure, and he's not exactly topping the NY Times bestsellers list. Some of you might point to Peterson, but criticizing identity politics isn't exactly on the same level as imagining new forms of government. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future is another example, but there isn’t much innovation there, just a story about re-combining the building blocks we already have. We need to tell better stories for better futures.

From my perspective, we're stuck in a philosophical rut, and the stakes to get it right going into the future are high.

In this theme, I'm interested in ideal governance: what kind of governance system should you set up if you're starting from scratch and can do it however you want? If the founding fathers of the United States were drafting their government from scratch in the modern world, what would it look like?

'Government' here could apply to a company, a nonprofit, an informal association, or a country. And "governance system" means a Constitution, charter, and/or bylaws answering questions like: "Who has the authority to make decisions (Congress, board of directors, etc.), how are they selected, and what rules do they have to follow, and what's the process for changing those rules?"

But specifically, I'm interested in how this could be applied to huge companies and countries, as the two are looking more and more alike by the day:

The Elysian

What if companies replace countries?

Welcome to Oblivion, a utopian novel I’m publishing with commentary imagining a more beautiful future. If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning or get caught up with the Index. This is an edit of chapter 7, my most recent chapter, which previously looked very different. More thoughts on why I made this change to the story in my author’s commentary at the bottom! Chapter 8 will be coming next week…

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3 years ago · 34 likes · 28 comments · Elle Griffin

III.

This is a very different topic from something like "How does the US's Presidential system compare to the Parliamentary systems common in Europe?" The idea is not to look at today’s most common systems but to generate options for setting up systems that are radically different from what's common today.

The problem doesn't lie solely with the United States. All contemporary governments rely on a restricted array of models, often to the disadvantage of their citizens. Singapore demonstrates a model where strict government control exists alongside a thriving market economy, but authoritarianism is as old as time. The Scandinavian countries have added a bit of socialist spice to their capitalist democracies, but the ingredients are same-old same-old.

We may have a non-optimal system that's only compounding over time. We have entrenched government templates that may block highly contingent societal betterment. Systems of government seem to be something with very high lock-in. The last few times a radical shift in humanity's templates for government took place were during the birth of the United States and the communist revolutions of Russia/China.

We're not going to find new continents on Earth to use for experimentation, and it's in our best interest to try to avoid any political upheaval that necessitates the deaths of tens of millions. But we are at the precipice of living in meaningful numbers in space and on other planets. Why should democracy be the default for Martian settlements? Why should we settle for communism aboard our century ships to Alpha Centauri?

Why should any future human civilization be beholden to our crusty, Earthbound ideology?

In the next post, I’ll explore the concepts of superforecasting, sortition, and some interesting ideas for enhancements to democracy that follow.

I.

In 1800, the entire population of the US was smaller than the current population of Miami. Today, American democracy serves over 330 million citizens. And yet despite this near hundred-fold growth, the foundations of US government rely on the same basic system that we implemented at the end of the eighteenth century. It's hard to blame the founding fathers for any lack of foresight; the world didn't historically grow at the rate it has over the last 200 years.

In systems thinking, there exists something of an implicit rule: systems are stable until some part of that system grows an order of magnitude or more. Think of roadways experiencing 10x more traffic after initially being built, city plumbing handling a population boom, a software application seeing its users grow tenfold. These types of artificial systems often don't hold up to increased scale, simply because they weren't designed to. This seems almost tautological: the design of a system takes certain variables into consideration, and when they change drastically the system no longer operates as it once did.

There have been obvious changes to the American system of government in the two and a half centuries since its founding, but perhaps the core system can't handle the load.

This isn't a novel idea. Plato suggested the ideal city-state would be small enough that most engaged citizens would likely be acquaintances. In Thomas More's infamous Utopia, the author regales his 16th(!) century audience with stories of a federation of democratic cities, very carefully limited to a particular size. The framers of the American constitution -- before Publius's papers swayed national sentiments -- favored a more limited federalism, believing the states of the union were best sized for individualistic democratic rule. Even before the population boom of modernity, political thinkers grappled with the need for manageable populations in democratic government.

Today's popular thought regarding the size of government has lost some nuance, with the reductio 'smaller is better' practically an axiom of modern conservative thought. And some of that sentiment rings true: smaller government is simpler government, and arguably less prone to the failure-modes that plague scale. However, a reduction of the overall size of government doesn't reduce the size of the public that government is responsible for. Even if we did away with the US federal government completely, the states would still need to rely on the average citizen to engage with politics that catered to tens of millions, a scale far beyond the original frame of American government.

There's the crux of the problem: individual citizens in modern democracy aren't equipped to effectively care about 30 million compatriots, let alone 330 million.

II.

Human social psychology does not hold up to scale. Dunbar's number, which is the estimated number of social connections an individual can maintain at once, is a measly 150. In Sapiens, Harari puts forward the idea of shared fictions, collaborative narratives a community can partake in to shirk the limitations of Dunbar's number without disintegrating. Any ideology can act as a shared fiction, and everything from alcoholism to Zoroastrianism allow individuals to transform into community.

As you change the size of a community, the public discourse within that community becomes qualitatively different. In simpler terms, the way we talk changes if groups get bigger or smaller. Consider something like a thread on the front page of Reddit. Reddit discussion tends to coalesce around a few standard popular opinions on a given topic, with nuance or heterodoxy getting buried. This is what we should expect: it's a popular forum with the potential for massive audiences, there is hardly room for complex discussion. As our groups get bigger, our shared fictions get simpler.

Democracy is itself a shared fiction. However, democracy at modern scale has to put forth a narrative that is not only comprehensible to hundreds of millions, but also facilitates their active engagement. In the world of literary fiction, mass appeal on the order of hundreds of millions comes only from our lowest common denominators, the magical schoolchildren and sexy vampires. Modern social fictions follow the same principles. Easily comprehensible stories, narratives of nationalism, populism, and hyper-tribalism, these are the fictions of modern national politics. Like Harry Potter, simple tales of us-versus-them, of good-versus-evil, are the dominant political narratives.

III.

There is a historical precedent for social and governmental construction that could solve some of these scale problems. There's a pattern pretty much as old as civilization itself, a construct of human organization that incubated our first great works of art, philosophy, and science. Notable examples include Ur, Thebes, and Athens in ancient times, and in modern times the cities of Malta and Singapore. Governments and societies neatly contained within a single set of walls, theoretical or actual.

Consider that most large US cities have a population near the size of the entire country at the inception of its federal government (remember that 5,300,000 number). It's a size where the average citizen can grok the specific ins and outs, the inner workings and political movements of their government. If you live in the US (or a similar democratic nation), consider the politics of your local city. You might not necessarily care about them, but it's hard to argue they're not more understandable than the byzantine maze that is federal politics. Depending on the size of the city, you might even know some of your local politicians personally.

The idea that local politics are more worthy of the average citizen's attention isn't a groundbreaking concept. It's often said that the most important politics happen at the city level, and that's undoubtedly where people can have the greatest individual impact. But the spectacle of national politics takes attention and energy away from local politics, while also dividing citizens across a simple binary.

So what if city politics weren't secondary to national politics, but instead were national politics? What if cities of the future took a sharp turn towards the historical? Might we see future city-states reminiscent of ancient Athens or Renaissance Florence?

Cities tend to have strong individual identities. Think about how city origin is many times a stronger point of pride than state origin, at least in the US. Community comes from constraints. Groups of people create their communal borders by the specific experiences and limitations they share. County lines, Sunday morning church, alumni from the year 2000, every community is defined by the smaller sectioned off from the larger. City-politics can be community politics, because cities are small. But national politics in the US cannot be community politics: the nation is simply too big.

Consider the recent trend of city governments in direct conflict with state governments, and state with federal, which highlights the frequent disconnect between the general will of the community, versus the decision-making of the nation. Another recent example: when the Trump administration decided to pull out of the Paris agreement, over 400 cities re-pledged support individually.

There is some precedent for the idea. Recent history has several examples of modern metropolises vying for separation from their parent nations, with New York City and London both flirting with independence in the modern day. The most obvious example of a full-fledged city-state in the modern day would be that of technocratic Singapore. With an independent government, economy, and military, the island nation has the closest resemblance to the city-states of old.

Singapore is a bit of a fraught example, but one still worth noting. By most definitions, Singapore is not really a democracy: The People's Action Party has always held power, and the country's prime minister (de facto absolute leader) Lee Hsien Loong is the son of the longest serving PM, Lee Kuan Yew. A strict definition of democracy would be one where a government has twice lost an election and freely given up power, a test of democracy that many 'democratic' nations including Singapore would fail. But, while Singapore may not serve as a paragon of democracy, it does serve as a good example of a successful modern city-state, an example that other democratic projects could in theory follow.

Leaving aside other projects with atypical physicality like virtual nations, seasteads, and charter cities, the physical size and geographic constraints of a city can be beneficial. Hyper-localization created by dense urbanization complements other potentially beneficial interests, such as increased environmentalism: the circular economy, local agriculture, a general DIY ethos, etc., are all easier to implement when a population is geographically close and shares a strong communal identity.

IV.

City-states, whether we consider modern examples or their ancient counterparts, are far from panacea, regardless of the simplified political narratives, the strong individual identities, and the benefits of geographic proximity. There are two obvious problems city-states face: military and trade. A city state needs to be protected from hostile interests, and it needs to be able to acquire the resources it can't produce on it's own.

The military issue could be tackled by a federation strategy similar to what exists currently the US. To address the military issue, a federal service requirement could be employed, requiring individual city-state members to contribute to the federal military. This was a common setup in the cities of ancient Greece. To ensure the federal military stays sizable enough to deter aggression, a service requirement is a viable option, in line with a system like South Korea's or Israel's. Singapore serves as an example of success in this field, with its sizable military and rigorous service requirements.

In the current climate of globalist politics, trade is no longer a significant challenge. Singapore is one of many countries that already participate in organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO). The greater challenge lies within each small nation's ability to produce something valuable. Securing domestic products is essential in order to remain competitive, and with the prevalence of high-skill remote work, city-states have a shot at doing so.

The wonder and horror of human government is that it's functionally immortal. As long as there are at least two humans left in the universe, there will also exist some way of organizing them. And the immortality of government is not Endymion's happy slumber; we've made excruciating progress up the ladder of egalitarianism, and often slid back into the systems of authoritarianism that seem to come so naturally to our species. An aspect of immortality is cyclicality, and it may just be that we're in for a renaissance of less, a return to ancient roots, nations contained within our city limits.

Thanks to Evyn Tindle for reviewing early drafts of this post.

"The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented" - Dennis Gabor, “Inventing the Future”, 1963

Once upon a time, humanity didn't believe the future could be changed.

For the entirety of civilized human history leading up to the Enlightenment, the idea of progress was not a coherent one. The thought that the future could be materially different from the present was as absurd as the inverse is to us today. Cycles or stasis were understood to be the only possible modes of human social systems.

This isn't all that strange if you stop to think about it. What reason would a pre-Enlightenment thinker have to doubt that the future would somehow be different from the present? Stability was the norm. Technology progressed slowly, and the problems of the day resembled those of years, decades, and centuries past. Institutions like the Oracle of Delphi persisted because they'd always be right, eventually. Until advancements in medicine came along, plagues would happen on a pretty regular cadence. Thus, if a plague was foretold in antiquity, it was bound to happen at some point.

This mode of understanding corrupted even potentially progressive ideology. Plato saw Greek society of his time as part of a cycle that would eventually decline. His famous Republic, in his own words, was an ideal human society that would not be particularly stable. In other words, the progenitor of the concept of utopia didn't think his utopia could last if it ever came to fruition. He also could not conceive that a social order other than that seen in the contemporary city-state could exist. The obvious problems of The Republic, including its rigid caste structure, gender disparities, eugenics policies, and dispassionate justice system are a result of Plato's inability to imagine a future status quo that was meaningfully different from the present. He saw the philosophical peak of ancient Greek culture without the ability to imagine that other mountains could even exist.

While ancient thinkers like Plato had part of what was required to move society forward, namely the ability to imagine more optimized versions of their current social structures, they lacked the other necessary piece. They lacked the ideological tools for enacting change, instead operating under the more limited framework of prophecy and stasis.

The Enlightenment changed this way of thinking. The flood of scientific and technological breakthroughs showed that change wasn't just possible, it was in some ways inevitable and uncontrollable. Revolution spread like wildfire, and the idea of progress entered the Western zeitgeist. We charged into Modernity, and the future became an infinite frontier of positive change.

In the last half-century or so, it seems that we've lost this spirit of progress, the inevitable pull forward into the aforementioned frontier. Up until World War Two, and a small slice of the postwar period after that, there was a marked sense that the future was just around the corner. Promises abounded. Abundant energy via nuclear fission, revolutions in air transport, the possibility of civilian space travel, all of these and more could be seen on humanity's horizons. And yet, instead of flying cars we've gotten 140 characters, as the saying goes.

Of course, there are some valid criticisms against this idea that we've become technologically stagnant. The progress of the last few decades has been mostly digital, with technology like smartphones, the Internet and the modern web ushering in a revolutionary era of communication. There's also the idea that we've already picked the low hanging fruit, that the explosion of progress in technology could not continue unabated. Like with most exponential curves, the reasoning goes, so too must this one plateau.

But even if we leave aside the question of whether digital technologies like the web are a benefit to society, progress in the non-digital realms has been arguably anemic. There are plenty of reasons for why this could be the case. One argument I'm fond of points the finger at postmodernism. The moral relativism, nihilism, and recursive irony that pervaded the 1970s to the early 2000s sufficiently disabused us of our ability to dream up grand narratives, to the detriment of the big, important projects. Instead of Clarke and Le Guin, our imaginations have been shaped by the likes of Palahniuk and Tarantino. This shift was warranted, of course. Our previous system of unbridled Modern values led down disastrous avenues. But we've over-corrected, applying the brakes instead of injecting caution and correcting course.

So where does that leave us? Are we doomed to stagnant purgatory, or will we get our flying cars?

I think the answer is pretty simple. It's wholly up to us. The idea that 'the best way to predict the future is to invent it' isn't an idle witticism. But it also doesn't have to be understood in the grand, maximal sense. To write the future we don't need to build behemoth organizations or climb to the highest ranks of institutional authority. To write the future, we just need to write convincing stories.

Pre-Enlightenment thinkers viewed the future as something static, horizons best understood by looking to the stories of the past. They were concerned with future-telling and prophecy, with Delphi and Nostradamus. During the Enlightenment, we unlocked future making, the idea that we could create the future by writing convincing fictions in the present. The digital age has given us the tools to create these stories on an unprecedented scale. We can create almost anything, share it with almost anyone, unrestricted by time and space. When Bellamy wrote his classic work of utopian fiction, looking into the future to Boston in the year 2000, he was not playing the part of the prophet but instead that of the architect. In a small way, he helped shape what the actual cities of today would look like. Through both inspiration and suggestion, science fiction and design fiction, the thinkers of the past molded our present.

While I think that we've slowed down in the last few generations, we now live in a world where the sum creative genius of our species can be pointed at the work of imagining greater futures, almost totally uninhibited. Bellamy helped build our present by imagining his future, but he was one of a select few who had the privilege and ability to do so. That privilege now exists for a much larger slice of humanity, and that's an awesome thing.

To get our flying cars, we need to keep creating the types of stories about the future where they plausibly exist. We need stories of utopian futures1, solarpunk imaginings, and design fictions that propose practical, plausible solutions to the present ills of society.

For my part, I imagine a future where we look back on the present day as an era of re-invigoration, a second act in the age of progress. I imagine the people of that far flung time looking back and saying:

Once upon a time, humanity believed the future was theirs to shape

Thanks to Evyn Tindle for reading drafts of this post, and to for continuing to inspire this newsletter with her work over at .

1

The Novelleist

I'm writing a utopian novel

Last September, I debuted my gothic novel Obscurity as a serial. I sent one chapter to my newsletter subscribers every week until it was done, and now I am holding the (very) first edition in my hands and have even sent it off to my paid subscribers at the Collector tier…

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4 years ago · 83 likes · 34 comments · Elle Griffin

Take a moment to imagine a city of the future1. There are all sorts of futuristic cities we can imagine, but In this particular city, there is no such thing as the web2.

There are a few ways this could have happened. Maybe the city was wrapped in a giant Faraday shield, a measure of last resort applied by architects who had no other recourse. Maybe there are sophisticated firewalls that separate the internal networks from the global web, a digital shield against the informational wasteland beyond. Perhaps the web simply doesn't exist at all.

But why would we want to imagine this future city?

I.

Let's talk about the web.

Parts of the web are pretty great. A lot of the web is interesting and weird and thought-provoking. There are all kinds of fascinating art, communities, and people on the web, and those people make good, thoughtful, and weird content. As an example, Substack is currently a place where you can find content that makes you think. The problem is, for most of the web-- what I think of as the 'popular web'--, that isn't the case.

The popular web mostly exists on the giant platforms (social and/or media), and takes one of two forms: content and conversation.

'Content' is what you find on the front page of YouTube, the average Instagram feed, or a high-schooler's TikTok account. In three (compound) words: short-form, personality-driven, and high-virality. Being on the popular web means being subject to constant bombardment by this type of content. It constantly demands our attention, it's mostly negative, and it generally contains very little informational value3. We're algorithmically pushed to numb ourselves under the deluge at all times, except for when we're zoning out to the advertisements that come for free.

Web content is just like off-web content, except for the fact that we can't seem to stop consuming it. This isn't really our fault. Unfortunately for us, thousands of the world's geniuses have been working tirelessly for years, hacking our psychology to optimize consumption. Given the current incentive structures and modi operandi of the web (see: ad-revenue driven), this isn't likely to change anytime soon. We all seem to have internalized this to some degree: everyone talks about the reality of their smartphone addiction, but in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that implies they'll never do anything about it.

'Conversation' is the other part of the popular web. It mostly happens on Twitter, with other comment-based watering holes mimicking Twitter to greater or lesser degrees (see: comments sections of the big media platforms). I'll admit, I don't spend a lot of time on Twitter, so you'll have to accept my perspective as an informed outsider. Gratuitously, Twitter is 'postmodern purgatory limited to 240 characters'. Full-bore irony, skepticism and moral relativism of the most extreme variety, about everything, all the time.

I won't argue that there aren't good parts of Twitter. There is for sure some interesting discussion that happens there. I will argue those are very small parts of the whole.

How did this happen? What is it about web-based comment sections and toilet-tweeting that makes us so cynical, so short-sighted and reactionary4? Why does the web seem to bring out some of our worst qualities? The answer is obviously nuanced.

There's something to be said for the period the web (and its primary users) grew up in. The and 90s and early 2000s were the sunset years of postmodernism in popular media. Nihilism, cynicism, and heavy materialism permeated the childhoods of those that are now the web's regular denizens. The web also strips conversation of interpersonal physical cues (body language, for instance), and enforces a widespread pseudo-anonymity. These characteristics also contribute to the norms of conversation on the web, but they don't tell the whole story.

In his fantastic review of the book The Dawn of Everything, Eric Hoel outlines what I think is the most compelling version of the ills of social media. In it, he talks about the idea of the 'gossip trap', a theory for why it took humanity so long to develop large communities (i.e cities). According to Hoel, the web (in this case social media in particular) has hi-jacked something primal about the way humans participate in society. This default mode for human society is a prehistoric version of the high-school lunch table. It never exceeded the Dunbar number, and status reigned supreme. Leadership emerged from pure charisma and populism, and the out group is always vying to get back in to the inner circle through whatever gossipy-backstabbing was available.

In this framing, the reason conversation on the popular web sucks is because we reverted back to our default mode. We re-adopted a framework for conversation and that is quite literally uncivilized. We got beyond that default mode by inventing formal structures -- social contracts, institutions with authority, laws, government-- and from there we could operate our communities beyond the limitations of pure interpersonal relationships.

But in one generation of technological development, we've created and scaled the tools needed to re-awaken our Elder God. Social media is the perfect anti-serum to all the rigid foundations of society, built up over centuries. It allows us to fall back to our base mode of social organization, one that is now used daily by the vast majority of the developed world.

II.

So the web is trap, a place where low value content reigns, where economies exist for our attention, and where reactionary uber-gossip dominates the conversation. What does any of this have to do with cities?

Cities are the fundamental unit of human civilization. To borrow from biology, cities are like cells, the smallest stable form of human society. Cities form the base for bigger structures like nations and unions, but the civilization demands cities at a minimum. When we first emerged from the clutches of the gossip trap, we did so in the form of cities. Empires and expansive nations have been fluid throughout history, rising and falling, but cities have remained stable. We don't have the Roman Empire any more, but we still have Rome.

Cities are also the smallest form of community where relevant societal changes happens. Cities are big enough for changes to the society within to matter, but also small enough that those changes happen organically, bottom-up.

Let's use smoking indoors as an example (in the US, at least). Once upon a time, we considered smoking cigarettes a normal part of everyday life. Most people didn't think smoking was bad for you. People smoked inside. Cigarettes were ingrained in the default fabric of society. This is no longer the case, but the transition from 'everyone smokes inside' to 'nobody smokes inside' didn't happen in one fell swoop.

San Luis Obispo, California was the first city in the US (and possibly the world) to ban smoking indoors in 1990, and before then even talking about a place where you couldn't smoke inside was strange. San Luis Obispo was the first, but it was in many ways the primary domino, a foreshadowing of how smoking as a social norm would play out in America.

This is the future of the popular web as well. An understood detriment to society, and one that communities regulate out of necessity.

Right now the web exists as an unexamined default in the backdrop of modern society. We consume the content and take part in the conversation, but it's only more recently that we've started casting a critical eye on the web's pitfalls. Much like San Luis Obispo, I think we'll soon have a city in the US that starts implementing limitations on the use of the web. Will it start with giant Faraday cages, or draconian firewalls? Certainly not. It will probably start with 'web free Sundays' born out of a growing sense that we need to start limiting this thing somehow. And it'll grow from there.

Green Bank is a town in West Virginia that has extremely limited access to the internet, by law. For all intents and purposes, the modern web does not exist there. Green bank is currently an oddity, a tiny town with a unique constraint that makes having ubiquitous internet availability (and therefore web availability) impossible. It's against the law to try and use a cellphone to send a tweet, or watch an online video.

I see a future where Green Bank is much closer to the average American city. Sure we'll still have places where access to the unrestricted web is available, like we have places where you can smoke inside and bet on sports games and gamble money away on the hope of a hard six. We'll have those type of places for the web, but we'll all agree that there are good reasons for limitations to exist, that completely unrestricted access is a detriment to society.

III.

I'm well aware of the irony here. I wrote this for the people of the web and distributed it on a contemporary web platform. It would probably not exist in the world I'm describing. But the reality is, these corners of the web are not the web. Substack, and the few places on the web like it, do something special by creating the kinds of intellectual spaces that have historically driven humanity forward.

The best parts of the web are the book clubs, seminars, academic societies and dialectic saloons— dedicated places where intelligent individuals from all over the world can interact and express their thoughts, share their writing, spread their ideas. These gatherings of minds are what make the web a place worth spending time in. But it's not what most of the web’s users are doing here. The web is an amazing tool for connection and understanding. Just think about how much we can know about places we’ve never been, about people we'll never meet, about eras we cannot live in! We have the collected knowledge of humanity at our fingertips, and the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere. But that’s only a small fraction of what goes on here. We need more than the tiny havens we wave. We need a place where the default for conversation is something other than sniping, cancelling, and infighting. A place where the content we consume inspires us rather than numbs us.

Real, community, productive community that moves humanity forward can't exist on a foundation of hyper-efficient capitalism and 240 character comments. So unless we can figure out a different default, we'll need to start building more Green Banks.

Thanks to Evyn Tindle for reading drafts of this piece, and thanks to  for the inspiring prompt!