there's no particular we. the idea is that organizations in the fray necessarily know what's going down. they interact directly, it's what they need to act on. 1/

people not in the fray, normies, hobbyists, can treat it all as entertainment, and fiction is more engaging than reality. 2/

if we have a world where most people interact, ideally in direct, IRL, human settings, with people in the fray — and importantly vice versa, so leaderships are held constantly to account… 3/

then there are trusted sources of truth, resources to debunk or confirm what people think they know from infotainment. 4/

right now, all most of us have is really infotainment. but we are exercising our obligations of citizenship in a fantasy world constructed simultaneously to engage and influence us. /fin

why we need to develop mediating institutions that aren't twitter, tiktok, or TV. or even bluesky. institutions whose leaders know what's going on, and whose rank-and-file interact personally with, and can hold accountable, those leaders. 1/

unions, political parties, fraternal orgs, churches, there're many possibilities. some of us tried to use universities for this, but that's a mistake. mediating institutions have to be able to be parochial in favor of interests of their memberships, but universities owe universal obligations. /fin

I really like Western ideas of individual enterprise free from the guidance of authority! But we can adapt them to alternative institutions! 1/

@vitalik.ca for example has had interesting ideas about decentralized ex post finance of public goods. Treat innovation as a public good, and let a diverse range people allocate state funds to the ones they perceive has having been very valuable. 2/

@deanbaker13.bsky.social has suggested giving all citizens a right to allocate sum of state money they can allocate to journalistic organizations that do not paywall. 3/

Even institutions where the state does play a formal role can be reformed to be much less discriminatory. Subsidies of fixed capital can be granted on the basis of proof that capital will be fixed and there's a plausible business plan to try to use it, without playing sectoral favorites. 4/

In general, the barriers to entry to granting systems, and the returns to connections or experience or expert-knowledge in applying for grants, can be diminished, and the range of activities for which grants can be offered can be made very broad. /fin

Yes. Absolutely we need to make rules! Stateless warlordism is not good for innovation. An otherwise decent state that did nothing to address the implications of the fact that innovation is costly but copying is not would be stagnant. 1/

But there are lots of ways to address those implications. We've become grandly proud and ideologically wedded to one approach, intellectual property "to benefit creators", which in practice is doing an increasingly poor job of that while extracting increasingly exorbitant rents. 2/

If we want to transition from this approach, we absolutely have to start adopting alternative, intentional, solutions. (@deanbaker13.bsky.social is very good on these.) Going laissez-faire (in a way most libertarians wouldn't recognize as laissez-faire) would not be sufficient. 3/

But the evidence grows ever stronger I think that the costs of our approach are very high, and we should be looking for better means of achieving (and hopefully surpassing) its benefits. /fin