From: jimruttshow8596
The concept of “civium” proposes a future societal structure that integrates human-scale communities with advanced virtual collaboration, serving as a potential civilizational design and transformation beyond the limitations of large cities [00:01:17]. This idea, detailed in Jordan Hall’s essay “From City to Civium,” is rooted in an analysis of scaling laws observed in biological and human systems [00:02:11].
Scaling Laws and Societal Evolution
Cities and Superlinear Scaling
Research by Jeffrey West and Luis Bettencourt highlights that while biological systems exhibit sublinear scaling (e.g., metabolic rate increasing by 75% when mass doubles [00:03:20]), cities demonstrate “superlinear scaling” [00:05:37]. This means that doubling a city’s population leads to a 15% increase in GDP per capita and other beneficial metrics like innovation and musical creations [00:05:53]. This superlinear scaling is linked to Metcalfe’s law, which suggests that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of connected users, particularly in the realm of information transfer [00:08:04].
Historically, cities have been powerful attractors due to their capacity to generate wealth and innovation through dense human interaction [00:10:08]. The development of civilization can be seen as a “progressive solution” to the challenges of sustaining increasing populations within these urban environments, addressing issues like food, water, waste, and housing [00:10:41]. Solutions have involved technologies of density (e.g., elevators, steel-frame construction [00:13:20]), transportation to virtualize space (e.g., trains, streetcars [00:12:34]), and “ephemeralization of communication” (e.g., writing, printing press, telegraph, telephone, television) [00:13:53].
The Dark Side of Superlinear Scaling
However, cities also experience “bad superlinear scaling” in areas like madness, corruption, crime, and sickness [00:20:04]. Until around 1890 in the West, cities were “net killers of people” due to unhealthiness, requiring constant repopulation from surrounding “Hinterlands” [00:20:21]. Addressing these problems has historically required significant institutional upgrades, such as the development of urban policing and sewage systems in Victorian London [00:22:23].
Current civilization faces similar challenges with increasing crime, corruption (degradation of social institutions [00:24:15]), and disease, pushing existing institutional forms to their limits and indicating a need for a “major regime change” [00:24:32].
The Dawn of Civium: A New Paradigm
The emergence of the digital realm marks a “tipping point” [00:16:26] where the quality of virtual collaboration can rival or surpass in-person interaction [00:16:31]. This shift allows for a “massive decoupling of the body and the mind” [00:25:22], moving the center of collaborative value to the virtual domain where more minds can connect than in any physical city [00:25:35]. This transition is seen as a major social and cultural change, akin to the shift from Indigenous knowledge systems to modern civilization [01:18:11].
The “civium” concept envisions a future where:
- Return to the Meso-Scale: Humans increasingly migrate to “human-scale humane embodied congregations” of 50-500 people (Dunbar’s number [00:34:57]), fostering long-term embodiment and care for their physical environment [00:35:01]. This revives the “meso scale” of community that was prevalent for the majority of human history [00:28:51]. Such communities would provide integrated physical, social, and spiritual sustenance, unlike the anonymous and sterile relationships with the market and government in modern society [00:29:32].
- Qualitative Virtual Engagement: Attention is directed towards “quality” in the virtual realm, with algorithms optimized for human well-being and the “highest quality relationality” [00:36:10] [00:32:51]. This contrasts with current models that optimize for revenue, often leading to suboptimal attention allocation [00:32:42].
- Mutual Reinforcement: The localized, healthy, and high-trust human communities (the “humane direction” [00:35:21]) would positively reinforce the quality of virtual interactions, and vice versa [00:39:49]. This creates a “reciprocal opening” for unprecedented value production, shifting from “scaling heaps to growing living things” [00:30:47].
This shift, driven by the superlinear scaling of communication, liberates a “tremendous amount of demand” [00:30:05] for meaningful local communities, which have often been sacrificed in the pursuit of urban scaling [00:26:08]. The decline in human well-being metrics (e.g., rising SSRI prescriptions, collapsing fertility, increasing suicide rates) underscores the urgency of this transition [01:41:12].
Challenges in Achieving Civium and the Role of Religion
The challenges in current civilization methods and systems are significant. Realizing the civium vision requires simultaneous social and cultural change in individuals and institutional structures [00:42:33]. For example, implementing “technical hygiene” (e.g., limiting smartphone use for children) is difficult without community support, but becomes easier when institutions (like a community covenant) reinforce these values [00:43:55].
Early attempts to build “civium-type things” (or “Proto Bs”) faced difficulties [00:45:01]. One key issue is the difficulty of forming “aligned hierarchies of values” within contemporary cosmopolitan urbanism, which often leads to a “lowest common denominator” of values [00:47:16]. This lack of deep, shared values and strong bonds (communion) makes communities fragile when faced with real hardship [00:48:31].
Another challenge is the “difficulty and complexity in fabricating a whole or wholesome social environment” from scratch [00:50:16], especially when contemporary “cultural toolkits” are highly dysfunctional [00:51:26]. The path forward involves “revivifying” existing, functional wholesomeness rather than attempting to create entirely new “seeds” of culture [00:51:42]. This approach emphasizes humility, slow growth, and learning from what is already present and thriving [01:09:41].
Religion as a Structural Framework
The concept of “religion” (lowercase ‘r’) is identified as the category encompassing the “institutional structures that make it easy” [00:53:19] for humans to cultivate communities with strong bonds, shared values, and durable practices [00:53:57]. Religion, in this sense, includes:
- Liturgy: “Work together” practices (cognitive, embodied, behavioral) that produce communion and bind people into a shared identity [01:01:58].
- Hierarchy of Values: Guiding principles that orient collective and individual life energy [01:02:50].
- Rituals: Structures or scaffolding that make it easier for people to live according to their values and respond to reality’s challenges [01:03:08].
While acknowledging historical corrupting elements within religions [00:54:16], the speaker suggests that certain aspects, like spirituality, are necessary for holistic human development. Spirituality involves the practice of healing traumas and deepening one’s soul, leading to a more “integrated self” [00:57:19].
A core tenet of this perspective is that “relationship is more fundamental than relata” [01:26:59], and that ideology (thinking via semantics) can be an obstacle to understanding [01:27:31]. True understanding and engagement, particularly with concepts like a “personal God,” require approaching reality through the modality of relationship [01:27:39] and cultivating “faith” as a faculty for navigating a particular relationship with reality [01:32:59].
This perspective implies that there is an objective “good” that humans strive to discern and live towards, even if their understanding of it is socially constructed [01:52:50]. The journey towards this good must be through freedom and personal choice, not tyranny [01:53:17].
Future of human collaboration and community-based living
The ongoing journey involves a commitment to living in discipleship, fostering intimate relationships within the community, and navigating the challenges of growth without sacrificing the beneficial aspects of human-scale social structures [01:55:00]. There is a responsibility to contribute wisdom to others seeking to build healthy communities, particularly within a predicted future of “choppy waters” economically, politically, and geopolitically [01:56:42]. The focus is on finding one’s “vocation” or proper calling, which may involve continued work on the civilizational design and transformation level [01:58:10].