The Society Builders: An Intermission
A quick essay for reflection, synthesis
It’s become clearer in writing The Society Builders series that what’s actually most interesting is the group of people—the network—behind whatever institutional form happens to express their ideas into the world.
So whether the network interfaces with the world through volunteer addiction recovery groups, Georgian-era political movements, cooperative ecosystems, venture-backed art societies, a society-bootstrapping-metasociety, or intra-corporate societies—the interesting thing is the network, the people themselves, and what they create amongst themselves in the “invisible” realm of culture, ideas, and ways of life.
And I suspect there’s lots of interesting observations that flow from focusing on that network rather than whatever form they take, the activities those forms get up to, or the achievements they ultimately produce.
For Alcoholics Anonymous the key thing isn’t their abundant meetings (123,000 worldwide). Instead the meetings express their “invisible” twelve steps and twelve traditions, their ideas and perspective on how to recover from addiction. The ideas animate the people, who animate the society, who deliver a great service to the world in distributed aggregate.
For the Clapham Circle the key thing wasn’t their leadership’s prominence on the English political stage but rather their intense commitment to an ethical view that quite simply wasn’t popular at the time—that slavery should be abolished. Their Christian faith commitment animated and anchored their activism for a long haul of persistent and networked advocacy that eventually won.
For Mondragon the key thing wasn’t the $13 billion in eventual revenue but the institutional commitment to labor’s prerogatives instead of owner’s—flowing into their governance, management pay cap, and remarkable growth and social impact by flowing capital into an abundant ecosystem predicated on those ideas.
For MSCHF the key thing isn’t their mastery of viral attention-getting but rather the subversive perspective that animates everything they create.
For the Network School the key thing isn’t its current version but rather the ideas and their potential to become generative among the community. There’s lots of ways to measure whether Network School will ultimately accomplish its aim, but a big one is asking in ten years, “How many startup societies emerged from its existence?”
And for IBM, the key thing isn’t its eventual inflation-adjusted $1.3 trillion market cap—rather it’s that the society they created amongst themselves was the type of place where you’d welcome the chance to sing songs together “in recognition of the noble aims and purposes of our International Service and Products.”
In some ways our survey so far is vindication of Balaji’s perspective that the constituent core of a startup society is One Commandment paired with a historical counter-narrative. If we wanted, we could put each society looked at thus far in those terms quite easily:
Alcoholics Anonymous: “Sobriety is good” “because contra contemporary thinking on addiction, the reality is that certain people can’t stop drinking when they start and thus need a Higher Power’s help to quit and stay quit.”
Clapham Circle: “Slavery is bad” “because contra slavery’s contemporary justification on grounds of economic necessity, everyone on earth is in fact a human being worthy of dignity, freedom, and agency, which slavery revokes.”
Mondragon: “Labor is good” “because despite past mistreatment, labor’s in fact powered capital’s efforts, so they deserve say in governance, parity in pay, and their needs to be fully considered”
MSCHF: “Subversive creativity is good” “because despite the status quo in art and commerce, it actually lets people see the world differently, which is inherently helpful and interesting.”
The Network School: “Startup societies are good” “because contra our usual way of thinking—where you’re default-committed to your native-born jurisdiction—the creation of new societies enable opt-in ability to join those new societies and receive new benefits thereby.”
IBM: “Technology is good,” “because contra assumptions one might make about the soullessness of corporations, technology actually enables people to work better and live better lives.”
We’ve been a little loose thus far about whether the society we’re inspecting is a “society” in the traditional sense. I like that actually, and think it’s generative to producing uncorrelated insights via gestalt and pattern-recognition.
So we’ll continue that approach with the forthcoming societies in the series, which contain almost entirely cautionary tales—a departure from the first set we evaluated. Those upcoming societies are:
The Fellowship (originators of Washington DC’s National Prayer Breakfast)
Rajneeshpuram (featured in the Wild Wild Country documentary)
The Italian NYC mafia families during the early 20th century
San Francisco House of the Latitude, a modern (and defunct) “secret society”
The midcentury NYC art scene, as told by Tom Wolfe
I’m excited to continue exploring these topics, and I’m grateful for the early positive response by readers. Please do subscribe, like, and comment if what you’re reading resonates, as it helps both essay reach and writer morale (though, since I’m super interested in these subjects, it mostly just helps reach!). Here’s a recap of where we’ve been, too, in case you’ve missed an essay or six. Thanks, and back soon.
Alcoholics Anonymous: How AA invisibly built the most influential decentralized society in world history
The Clapham Circle: How 12 families in a London suburb abolished slavery
The Mondragon Corporation: A historical blueprint for cooperative capitalism (with a crypto lens)
MSCHF (aka Mischief, aka Miscellaneous Mischief): How to create a venture-backed art society that creates subversive culture
The Network School: Dispatch from the Malaysian ghost-city startup society (that bootstraps startup societies)
IBM: What their 1937 Song Book says about a bygone era of Corporations-as-Societies
The Fellowship: A cautionary tale of the secretive Washington DC "politico-religious" society
Rajneeshpuram: Four comments on the 7000-member Oregon commune (that the US Government destroyed)