From: jimruttshow8596
The ongoing global transition is marked by swift technological progress and the potential for major societal shifts [00:00:43]. Jordan Hall’s essay, “From City to Civium,” explores these shifts, particularly concerning the impact of technology on human communication and societal structures [00:01:17].
Scaling Laws and Societal Organization
The analysis in “From City to Civium” is grounded in the work of Jeffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and others on scaling laws [00:02:20].
Biological vs. City Scaling Laws
- Biological Scaling Laws: In biological systems, a sublinear scaling factor is observed [00:02:59]. For instance, if an animal’s mass doubles, its metabolic rate increases by only 75% (a three-quarters law) [00:03:25]. This fundamental rule shapes biology, including animal size, speed, and food chains [00:04:01].
- Human Systems (Corporations): Some human systems, like corporations, also exhibit sublinear scaling [00:05:15]. Adding more people to a large organization does not linearly increase income or revenue [00:05:22].
- City Scaling Laws: Cities, however, show a distinctly different pattern: superlinear scaling [00:05:39]. Doubling a city’s population increases GDP per capita, innovation, patents, and musical creations by approximately 1.15 times [00:05:57]. This superlinear scaling means the curve gets steeper and steeper, indicating a qualitatively different regime [00:06:28].
The hypothesis is that this superlinear scaling in cities is analogous to Metcalfe’s Law, driven by increasing connectivity and the nature of information transfer [00:07:04], [00:07:55]. Information is a different aspect of reality than energy; once a pattern (like calculus) is discovered, copying or transmitting it is much less expensive than inventing it [00:08:54].
Solutions for Urban Growth
Historically, cities have addressed the challenges of superlinear scaling through three basic solutions [00:12:21]:
- Density: Technologies and institutions to accommodate more people in the same space (e.g., elevators, steel-frame construction) [00:12:25], [00:13:22].
- Transportation: Technologies that virtualize space by increasing velocity, effectively “folding” the urban environment (e.g., trains, streetcars) [00:12:34], [00:13:37].
- Ephemeralization of Communication: Technologies that allow information transfer without physical proximity, enabling mind-to-mind contact regardless of spatial or temporal distance [00:13:53]. Examples include messengers, writing, printing press, telegram, telephone, and television [00:14:01].
The Digital Revolution and the Shift to “Civium”
The advent of the digital realm marks a fundamental pivot [00:15:02]. Unlike analog forms of mediation, digital technology can produce all forms of media (video, audio, text), acting as a lower-level substrate [00:15:52]. This capacity means that the ephemeralization of communication is reaching a tipping point where the quality of collaboration between minds mediated by the digital is sufficient to shift the center of collaboration from embodied, in-person encounters to purely virtual or digital interactions [00:16:39].
The COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in 2020, acted as a forcing function, moving people into building capacity for virtual communication [00:16:55]. Technologies like the Apple Vision Pro represent significant step functions in the ability to virtualize relationality [00:18:05]. This shift is also evident in demographic changes, with younger generations like Gen Z having a very different relationship to the virtual than older generations [00:18:16].
Negative Superlinear Scaling and Societal Crisis
Just as good things scale superlinearly in cities, so do negative aspects, including madness, corruption, crime, and sickness [00:20:18]. Cities were historically net killers of people until the late 19th century due to unhealthiness [00:20:30]. To deal with these “bad superlinear scaling” problems, cities require radical shifts in institutional structure and massive infrastructure upgrades [00:21:14]. The Victorian era, for instance, saw the invention of urban policing and large-scale sewage systems to address rising crime and disease in cities like London [00:22:23], [00:22:44].
Currently, society is again facing an unsustainable crisis point with rising crime, corruption (degradation of social institutions), and disease, reaching the limits of 20th-century institutional forms [00:24:35]. This coincides with the shift towards the virtual, suggesting that digital solutions might be critical in addressing these problems and fueling the transition to a new construct: civium [00:25:08].
The Civium Concept: Rebalancing Human Experience
The “civium” concept posits a massive decoupling of the body and mind, where the value of collaboration is increasingly driven by the virtual [00:25:24]. More minds can collaborate virtually than in any physical city, leading to a migration of collaborative capacity into the virtual realm [00:25:40]. This shift will have a reciprocal effect, making cosmopolitan urban environments less attractive as they retain the negative aspects of population density but lose the benefits of collaborative density [00:25:59].
Reclaiming Human Elements
Civium aims to unlock a new capacity to reestablish human elements that civilization has sacrificed [00:26:12]. Cities are often unhealthy for minds (increasing insanity, depression) and bodies, and cultural artifacts are often cobbled together to subordinate human needs to the needs of scaling [00:26:36]. For example, oppressive policing in large cities contrasts sharply with community-based law enforcement in smaller locales [00:26:51].
The “meaning crisis” described by John Vervaeke suggests modern urbanized people have lost an immense “area under the curve of meaningfulness” available to Homo sapiens [00:27:50]. Life in a natural environment with a caring community is noticeably more meaningful and vital than the fast-paced, anonymous urban experience [00:28:13].
The shift to civium maps to a transition from quantity to quality, or “scaling heaps to growing living things” [00:30:47]. The local component of civium involves a return to the “meso scale” – communities of 50 to 500 people where individuals are known and supported [00:30:03], [00:29:08].
The Problem of Digital Attention
Metcalfe’s Law measures the potential value of a network, which increases exponentially with the number of nodes [00:31:28]. However, the actual value is determined by the specific point-to-point connections [00:31:37]. This highlights a new frontier: mechanisms to orient finite human attention to the highest quality relationships within the vast network possibilities [00:32:05].
Algorithms in platforms like Twitter and Facebook (and Instagram) are currently optimized to maximize revenue from user attention, leading to “suboptimal attention allocation functions” for human well-being [00:32:46], [00:33:22]. This focus on short-term monetary gain often drives behavior towards social deviance or mental unhealthiness [00:33:57].
The vision for civium includes a world where the curation of attention is optimized for human well-being within planetary limits [00:34:24]. This would involve designing social media systems governed by the “logic of civium,” focusing on high-quality relationality, generative dialogue, and surfacing truth [00:36:38]. This represents a potentially “multiplicative” upside, combining healthy embodied communities with curated digital interactions [00:39:19].
Challenges and Technology Toxicity
A significant challenge in this transition is establishing “technology hygiene” [00:40:03]. For example, allowing young children smartphones is seen as an “abomination” that can be more harmful than smoking cigarettes [00:43:04]. While personal change is important, it is difficult to maintain without the support of institutional structures and a coherent local social network [00:43:44].
The current trajectory, if unchecked, suggests that technology and the domination of the digital could “consume the seed corn of humanity,” pushing society across undesirable thresholds [00:41:02]. Indicators like rising SSRI prescriptions (proxy for depression), declining fertility rates, and increasing suicide rates point to a decline in human well-being that may be reaching non-recoverable thresholds [00:41:31].
Institutional Change and the Role of Religion
The experience of building early-stage “civium” or “Proto B” communities revealed a key difficulty: the necessity for simultaneous change in both individuals and institutional structures [00:42:33]. Most people find it almost impossible to maintain new values without the support of surrounding institutions [00:43:55].
The category of “institutional structures that make it easy” for people to live by certain values is “religion” [00:53:32]. Religion, in this context, refers to frameworks that cultivate communities with strong bonds (communion) and a shared, lived orientation towards a hierarchy of values that is durable across different permutations [00:54:08]. This includes:
- Liturgy: The collective “work together” (cognitive, embodied, behavioral) that produces communion and binds people into groups with shared identity [01:02:14].
- Hierarchy of Values: What highest values a community orients its life energy towards [01:03:04].
- Rituals: Structures and practices that make it easier for people to live according to their values and respond to the context of reality [01:03:16].
Contemporary secular or urban cosmopolitan understandings of concepts like spirituality, religion, faith, and the supernatural are often impoverished or even inverted [00:55:59]. Yet, some of these concepts and faculties are necessary for human flourishing and community building [00:56:08].
The ability to create wholly wholesome social environments from scratch is immensely difficult [00:50:26], especially given that modern cultural toolkits are often dysfunctional due to the “toxins” of civilization [00:51:31]. Instead, the path forward may involve “pouring water on plants that are already well-suited and arising in niches” [00:51:50], implying a restoration or rediscovery of existing, functional wholesomeness.