Neocameralism #1¶
Clippings from this, end-2007 Moldbug Neocameralism essay (with minimal commentary):
It is very hard to show that any new form of government is superior to that practiced now. It is even harder to show that any new form of government is superior to any practiced ever. […] Nonetheless, unless these problems are not just hard but actually unsolvable, innovation in the form of government is possible. … Certainly, the very idea of innovation in government should not frighten you. If it does, there is no point at all in thinking about government. This is conservatism to the point of mental disorder. I simply cannot contend with it, and I refuse to try. If you cannot set yourself outside your own beliefs and prejudices, you are not capable of normal civilized discourse.
Neocameralism is not (simply) reactionary because it has never been fully instantiated up to this time. It is a proposed political-economic innovation.
Let’s start with my ideal world – the world of thousands, preferably even tens of thousands, of neocameralist city-states and ministates, or neostates. The organizations which own and operate these neostates are for-profit sovereign corporations, or sovcorps. For the moment, let’s assume a one-to-one mapping between sovcorp and neostate. […] Let’s pin down the neocameralist dramatis personae by identifying the people who work for a sovcorp as its agents, the people or organizations which collectively own it as its subscribers, and the people who live in its neostate as its residents.
A Neocameral ‘neostate’ is not owned by its residents or its agents. Its ‘monarch’ (or ‘CEO’) is an executive appointment. (90% of all confusion about Neocameralism, and Neoreaction in general, stems from a failure to grasp this elementary point.) Note: ‘subscribers’ (plural). More coming on this immediately.
Every patch of land on the planet has a primary owner, which is its sovcorp. Typically, these owners will be large, impersonal corporations. We call them sovcorps because they’re sovereign. You are sovereign if you have the power to render any plausible attack on your primary property, by any other sovereign power, unprofitable. In other words, you maintain general deterrence. […] (Sovereignty is a flat, peer-to-peer relationship by definition. The concept of hierarchical sovereignty is a contradiction in terms. …) […] The business of a sovcorp is to make money by deterring aggression. Since human aggression is a serious problem, preventing it should be a good business. Moreover, the existence of unprofitable governments in your vicinity is serious cause for concern, because unprofitable governments tend to have strange decision structures and do weird, dangerous things. […] (Nuclear deterrence (mutual assured destruction) is only one small class of deterrent designs. To deter is to render predictably unprofitable. Predictably unprofitable violence is irrational. Irrational violence is certainly not unheard of. But it is much, much rarer than you may think. Most of the violence in the world today is quite rational, IMHO.) […] General deterrence is a complex topic which deserves its own post. For the moment, assume that every square inch of the planet’s surface is formally owned by some sovcorp, that no one disagrees on the borders, and that deterrence between sovcorps is absolute.
Patchwork is a (transcendentally) flat network. No global sovereign. At the ultimate level of its instantiation, it consists of P2P connections between independent nodes.
This does not solve the problem of constructing a stable sovcorp. The central problem of governance is the old Latin riddle: who guards the guardians? The joint-stock corporate design solves the central problem by entrusting guardianship in the collective decisions of the corporation’s owners, voting not by head but by percentage of profit received. […] The joint-stock model is hundreds of years old. It is as proven as proven can be. […] … However, in the sovereign context, the corporate joint-stock ownership and decision structure faces serious challenges which do not exist for a conventional secondary corporation. […] In the conventional secondary corporation, the control of the owners is unchallenged and unchallengeable, at least as long as the sovereign’s rule of corporate law is functioning properly. The corporation is incorporated under the oversight of a sovereign protector, or sponsor. This is what makes it a secondary corporation. …
The Neocameral organizational problem is here defined.
… classical political thought concurred in considering imperio in imperium, ie, internal subauthorities powerful enough to resist or even control the center, a political solecism. In case you are not too special to have ever worked in a cube, you are probably aware that imperio in imperium is a solecism in Powerpointia as well. One small difficulty, however, is that imperio in imperium means basically the same thing as separation of powers. Hm. […] Internal management in modern Western corporations is pretty good. At least by the standards of modern government, imperio in imperium is nonexistent. (It should not be confused with the normal practice of internal accounting, which does not in any way conflict with an absolute central authority and a single set of books.)
The model for avoidance of imperio in imperium is joint-stock business organization. It is thus equivalent to the control of executives, or the preservation of sovereign capital imperatives (through effective resolution of the principal-agent problem). Solution of the P-A problem at the level of State governance is the task of Neocameral administrative design.
Briefly, there are two options for sovcorp governance on a neocameralist patchwork planet. One is cross-listing and the other is cryptogovernance. In cross-listing, sovcorps list on each other’s secondary exchanges, taking great care to select only the most reputable sponsors, and demanding a backdoor in which they can switch sponsors at the slightest hint of weirdness. […] Cross-listing can probably be made to work. However, it is dangerous as a single line of defence. For an ideal sovcorp, it should be combined with some degree of cryptogovernance. […] Cryptogovernance is any system of corporate government in which all formal decisions are endorsed and verified cryptographically. A sponsor can still be very useful for cryptogovernance, but it is not required. Shareholders in a cryptogoverned corporation – known as subscribers – use private keys to sign their contributions to its governance. They may or may not be anonymous, depending on the corporation’s rules. […] If you are an American, have you ever wondered what the letters SA, or similar, which you see all the time in the names of European companies, mean? They mean “anonymous society.” If this strikes you as weird, it shouldn’t.
Do any #HRx types still think this is their universe?
The neat thing about cryptographic government (which is actually much easier than it sounds – we’re talking a few thousand lines of code, max) is that it can be connected directly to the sovcorp’s second line of defense: a cryptographically-controlled military. […] Cryptographic weapons control, in the form of permissive action links, is already used for the world’s most powerful weapons. However, there is nothing in principle preventing it from being extended down to small arms – for example, with a radio activation code transmitted over a mesh network. Military formations loyal to the CEO will find that their weapons work. Rebel formations will find that theirs don’t. The outcome is obvious. Moreover, the neocameralist state has no incentive to deal kindly with traitors, so there is no way for an attacker to repeatedly probe the system’s weaknesses. […] The one difficulty with cryptographic weapons control is that it fails, and devolves into simple military rule, if the authorization keys are kept anywhere near the weapons. Weaponholders can gather unlocked or noncryptographic weapons secretly, and use them to arrest the keyholders – for example, the directors of the sovcorp. […] The solution is simple: keep the sovcorp’s directors, or whoever has ultimate control of the highest grade of military keys, outside the sovcorp’s neostate. Even if the CEO himself rebels, along with all of his subordinates, any formation loyal to the directors can defeat them. The result is internal military stability.
Agree with where Moldbug is going with this, or not, the line of thought is profoundly illustrative of the Neocameral problem, as originally conceived, which lies within the general framework of cryptographic property protection (and not that of romantic political attachment).