That god need not be a general AI. It could encode a specific morality. It could be tuned and trained on particular corpora rather than the general web. What would Jesus do (WWJD), in an app? The Chinese Xuexi Qiangguo app could in fact be seen as an early version of this — “What would Xi Jinping do?” — though one could also have decentralized vers

History tells you who’s in charge. Why did Orwell say that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past? Because history textbooks are written by the winners. They are authored, subtly or not, to tell a story of great triumph by the ruling establishment over its past enemies.

You want to recruit producers, not consumers, and for that, you’ll need a purpose.

That’s a theoretical argument. An observational argument is that we know that the technological innovation of the Renaissance began by rediscovering history. And we know that the Founding Fathers cared deeply about history. In both cases, they stepped forward by drawing from the past. So if you’re a technologist looking to blaze a trail with a new

technology provided a more robust means of determining what was true than the previous gold standards — whether that be the “paper of record” or the party-state. It decentralized the determination of truth away from the centralized establishment.

Train Crash model: those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Another way to think about history is as a set of expensive experiments, where people often made certain choices that seemed reasonable at the time and ended up in calamitous straits. That’s communism, for

If a startup begins by identifying an economic problem in today’s market and presenting a technologically-informed solution to that problem in the form of a new company, a startup society begins by identifying a moral issue in today’s culture and presenting a historically-informed solution to that issue in the form of a new society.

These cover the six essential parts of the state: borders, population, central government, international sovereignty, diplomatic recognition, and the domestic monopoly on violence.

So: in the 1800s you wouldn’t steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you didn’t steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you can’t steal because the Network won’t let you.