From: jimruttshow8596
The modern era is characterized by a significant global transition, marked by rapid technological progress and profound societal shifts [00:00:37]. Jordan Hall’s essay “From City to Civium” explores these technological and societal challenges, proposing a shift in societal organization driven by fundamental scaling laws and the impact of technology on societies and individuals [00:01:17].
Scaling Laws and Urban Dynamics
Research by Jeffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and others on scaling laws reveals distinct patterns in biological and human systems [00:02:22].
Biological and Corporate Scaling
Biological systems, such as animals and trees, exhibit sublinear scaling for metabolic rates: doubling an animal’s mass increases its metabolic rate by only 75% [00:03:02] [00:03:20]. This “three-quarters law” fundamentally shapes biology, influencing animal size and food chains [00:03:52]. Similarly, some human systems, like corporations, also show sublinear scaling, where adding more people does not linearly increase income or revenue [00:05:05] [00:05:15].
Superlinear Scaling in Cities
In stark contrast, cities exhibit superlinear scaling [00:05:31]. Doubling a city’s population leads to a 15% increase in GDP per capita, innovation, and musical creations [00:05:41] [00:05:50]. This means cities become disproportionately wealthier and more innovative as they grow [00:06:03]. This superlinear effect is an “attractor,” drawing people to congregate and benefit from increased interconnectedness and information transfer, akin to Metcalfe’s Law in networks [00:07:07] [00:10:19].
However, superlinear scaling also applies to negative aspects: madness, corruption (degradation of social institutions), crime, and sickness increase disproportionately with city size [00:19:54]. Historically, cities were “net killers of people” until around 1890 due to their unhealthiness, requiring constant repopulation from rural areas [00:20:27] [00:20:37].
Solutions and Institutional Upgrades
To manage the challenges of urban growth, societies have developed solutions across three regimes:
- Technologies of Density: Innovations like elevators and steel-frame construction allowed cities to grow vertically, increasing population within limited physical space [00:12:21] [00:13:16].
- Technologies that Virtualize Space (Transportation): Trains and streetcars “bent space” by increasing velocity, effectively expanding the urban environment without physical densification [00:12:34] [00:13:50].
- Ephemeralization of Communication: This involves technologies that reduce the cost and effort of transmitting information, allowing minds to collaborate without physical proximity. Early examples include messengers and writing, followed by the printing press, telegraph, telephone, and television [00:13:53] [00:14:01].
These advancements necessitated significant institutional upgrades. For example, 19th-century London faced severe issues with crime and disease due to its growing population. Solutions included the invention of modern urban policing and massive investments in sewage infrastructure, demonstrating that overcoming superlinear scaling problems requires major shifts in institutional capacity, technology, and societal processes [00:21:14] [00:22:23] [00:22:44].
The Shift to Civium
The current era is reaching the limits of existing institutional forms, facing problems similar to those of the Victorian era, including rising crime, corruption, and global disease challenges [00:24:26] [00:24:41]. This suggests a need for another major regime change [00:24:44].
The rise of digital technology marks a crucial tipping point [00:16:14]. Unlike previous media, digital is a universal substrate capable of producing all forms of communication (video, audio, text), suggesting that the quality of virtual collaboration will soon surpass in-person interactions [00:15:48] [00:16:29]. This is further accelerated by generational shifts, as younger generations (Gen Z) have a different relationship with the virtual world than older ones [00:18:14].
This phenomenon drives the concept of “civium,” a new form of societal organization where the center of collaborative gravity shifts to the virtual realm [00:25:15].
Characteristics of Civium
Civium is characterized by a “massive decoupling of the body and the mind” [00:25:22]. It comprises two main directions:
- Humane Embodied Congregations: A migration of humans into smaller, human-scale communities, likely around Dunbar’s number (e.g., 150-500 people) [00:34:48] [00:35:01]. These communities foster long-term relationships, strong bonds, and a deeper sense of care for the physical environment and community [00:28:13] [00:35:03]. This involves “relearning how to be humans together” and recovering the “meaningfulness” lost in hyper-urbanized settings [00:27:54] [00:35:39]. This is a return to a “meso scale” where individuals are part of intact communities and can rely on face-to-face interactions for physical, social, and spiritual sustenance [00:28:51] [00:29:59].
- Qualitative Virtual Collaboration: Focused attention on improving the quality of virtual interactions, moving away from algorithms optimized for revenue (like those of Facebook or Twitter) towards those that prioritize human well-being, high-quality relationality, truth-seeking, and generative dialogue [00:32:32] [00:36:05]. This unlocks the potential for “orders of magnitude” more value from digital networks [00:33:17].
The transition to civium implies a shift from “quantity to quality” or from “scaling heaps to growing living things” [00:31:08]. The benefits are multiplicative: healthier embodied lives combined with vastly more powerful and well-curated digital networks for problem-solving and interchange [00:39:17].
Challenges of Transition
Achieving this transition is challenging because it requires simultaneous changes in both individuals and institutional structures [00:42:33]. Personal changes (like embracing technological hygiene, e.g., limiting smartphone use for children) are difficult to maintain without the support of surrounding institutions [00:43:33]. Establishing shared values and strong communal bonds within intentional communities is difficult because individuals from urbanized societies often lack deeply aligned hierarchies of values [00:47:11] [00:50:00].
Societies at the “far end of civilization” often have dysfunctional cultural toolkits that hinder the creation of wholesome social environments from scratch [00:51:26] [00:51:28]. The solution lies not in inventing completely new cultures, but in “pouring water on plants that are already well-suited,” reviving existing, wholesome practices and communities [00:51:52].
The Role of Religion and Spirituality
The category that historically enables the cultivation of communities with strong bonds and shared value hierarchies is religion [00:53:57]. Religion, in this context, encompasses:
- Liturgy/Communion: Collective work that binds people into groups with a shared identity, fostering relationality [01:01:58] [01:02:24].
- Hierarchy of Values: Guiding principles that orient individual and group energy towards higher goods [01:02:50].
- Rituals: Structures and scaffolding that make it easier for people to live according to their values and respond to the challenges of reality [01:03:09] [01:03:12].
Spirituality, often viewed as dealing with the “deep self,” involves healing traumas and cultivating a deeper capacity to engage with the meaningfulness of life [00:57:19] [00:57:40]. Faith, in this framework, is a faculty for navigating this relationship with reality that can be cultivated through practice [01:33:50] [01:33:56].
The idea of civium aims to create a world where human well-being within planetary limits is prioritized [00:34:22]. This represents a significant step in the future of civilization and societal challenges, moving towards a new form of human thriving.