DouglasReay/DysonBubble2

What sort of meta-society would work well for a Dyson Bubble society with a population of 10,000,000,000,000,000 people (more than 1 million times greater than that of our current Earth)?

A combination of

Think of each of the 10 billion cities as being maker nodes, each with a physical presence and an online presence.

Amphictyony

An amphictyony would be a collection of nodes that trust each other sufficiently to know the physical location that corresponds to the node's online presence, and which the collective of those nodes trust sufficiently to certify that, as a member node, that node is NOT getting up to certain things (such as slavery, torture, spamming, or whatever - it varies from amphictyony to amphictyony). A node could, in theory, belong to multiple amphictyonies. Though not all of them, since some might have mutually exclusive requirements, or just charge membership fees. And most nodes wouldn't want to be promiscuous with giving out their physical location, because the more nodes that know where you are, the greater the chances of someone taking offence at one of your online (or physical) actions and lobbing a rock at you, or boiling you alive with concentrated reflected sun beams.

Examples of amphictyonies:

Norwegian Monarchy - there's a capital node containing the monarch, it makes the laws, and the other nodes are required to obey. Only humans with 50% or higher Nordic ancestry may become permanent residents of member nodes.
Communist paradise - it tracks the wealth of member nodes, and redistributes it equally each year
Swiss Banking Federation - member nodes must retain a provable reserve of wealth, and follow strict guidelines on privacy and reputation for keeping to trade agreements
Slacker Anarchy - any node can join that's cool enough to maintain an elite score in at least 5 out of a list of accredited 'hot' online virtual games.

The means of monitoring would vary depending upon criteria. It could involve visits by auditors from other nodes, telescope surveillance, or visitor bots as with the maker node society.

You could think of an amphictyony as being like a franchise (like in Snow Crash) or like a species. Something whose DNA can mutate and replicate over nodes.

Market

The next level up from an amphictyony is a market. Think of it as a mix network that handles anonymising physical transport between nodes of different member amphictyonies, and which tracks their reputation. Does the amphictyony keep control over its nodes? Does those nodes obey the mix net protocol? How fast is the amphictyony growing, and do nodes leaving it have bad tales to tell? How is it on individual human rights? Can people visit? Can individuals leave? Do they have free net access? What's their standard of living?

The market doesn't itself, judge. It merely lists criteria, provides provenance for the info, and provides a forum for other nodes and amphictyonies to decide whether they want to invest in (or even trade at all) with the amphictyony. It could provide prediction markets, and also markets for services such as arbitration.

A market's online presence can be thought of as a dark net, or a meta-amicog. It might provide gateway nodes, whose location is publicly broadcast, that can be used for point to point shipping across the Dyson bubble. It could also coordinate functions such as producing new nodes to replace wear-and-tear, and light focusing to defend against asteroids or rogue cities.

A market is an ecosystem, that shapes how member amphictyonies compete to grow, making sure that new nodes or space don't go purely to those that mine resources or breed the fastest, but instead allow the local collective to define other dimensions of 'fitness' to compete on, such as human happiness, scientific discoveries or artistic capital.

Different amphictyonies might have different collective opinions on what's important. Or different opinions on what counts as human (ai? genetic enhancement?). And might only 'list' amphictyonies that the market trusts to monitor their member nodes sufficiently on certain points (eg freedom of travel for individual humans).

Evolution

By default, species do not evolve to make individuals happy. Individuals who take time for leisure, have only a few children, and invest for the long term to allow their children to live lives of even more leisure; tend to get out-competed by individuals who are less happy but who work their fingers to the bone in order to have and raise as many children as they can support.

Once humanity spreads out to other stars, the same might hold true. Unless other forces apply, a colony of artists that works in harmony with its planet to grow slowly but make the planet a beautiful place, will get out competed by a colony founded upon different principles that strip mines their planet and asteroid belt as quickly as possible in order to send out 10 new colony ships in the time it takes the artist colony to decide upon a colour scheme for their fountains.

So the first colony that humanity sends out is important. We want it to have a strong ethos that the societal patterns for each new colony need to be an improvement upon the patterns of the parent. Not just improved in efficiency (time to replicate itself), but in individual prosperity and individual freedoms. Because once there's a stable colony, there's not a lot the home solar system can do to restrict what it does, or influence it further, unless the humility (team-spiritedness?) to respect the influence of its peers, is a fundamental part of the culture.

Different markets can be seen as different visions of that future culture. Testbed environments for evolving stable systems of mutually-cooperating species.

Because nodes (or even whole amphictyonies) can physically move, sailing around bubble to an area controlled by a different market, they can be seen as voting with their feet for the vision they wish to subscribe to.

Freedom versus Prosperity

Have a read of the fish farm example in [Meditations on Moloch].

In order to escape the tragedy of the commons and other races to the bottom, a society needs some coordination. Some way of coercing defectors or incentivising people. Some way of saying "Here are some benefits that we, the collective, can grant you. But, in order to qualify for them, you must not only agree to our rules, but you must also stake something valuable that you'll lose if we find out that you've broken the rules (more than you stand to win by breaking them), and you must sacrifice enough of your privacy that we have some confidence in our ability to find out whether or not you have broken the rules."

But such things can be taken to extremes. There's always someone who'll vote for more and more control over others, rather than tolerate differences. Just as there's always someone who'll vote for less and less control, because they think that they, personally, are in a good position to profit more than average if the rules are relaxed. A balance is needed.

In order to achieve a society that has both better individual freedoms AND has a high individual prosperity, for the same rate of societal growth, what's needed is an improved ratio of coordination to loss of personal freedom. (Similar to the concept of 'getting more bang for your buck'). Decentralisation needs to be done thoughtfully, in a manner that still allows some efficient coordination to keep individual incentives sufficiently aligned with the group welfare, for the median of the collective to prosper as a whole, and not by predating upon the bottom quartile.

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