From: jimruttshow8596
Civium is a theoretical framework proposed by Jordan Hall, a tech entrepreneur and longtime collaborator of Jim Rut, stemming from insights into global transitions marked by rapid technological advancements and societal shifts [00:32:00]. The concept was initially explored in Hall’s Medium essay “From City to Civium” [01:17:00].
Scaling Laws: The Foundation of Civium
The initial analysis for civium is grounded in the work of Jeffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and others on scaling laws [02:11:00].
Biological Scaling Laws
Biological systems, such as animals, exhibit a sublinear scaling factor [02:56:00]. This means that as an animal’s mass doubles, its metabolic rate increases by only 75%, following a three-quarters law [03:23:00]. This principle is fundamental to biology, influencing the size and speed of animals and shaping the food chain [03:54:00]. For example, an elephant is about 20 times less energetic per pound of meat than a mouse [04:08:00]. This law cannot be violated [04:53:00].
Corporate Scaling Laws
Human systems, such as corporations, also show sublinear scaling in some aspects [05:05:00]. For instance, adding an additional person to a large organization does not result in a linear increase in income or revenue; there is an asymptote [05:15:00].
City Scaling Laws
In contrast to biological and some corporate systems, cities exhibit superlinear scaling [05:39:00]. Doubling a city’s population leads to a 1.15 times increase in GDP per capita, along with other positive outcomes like innovation and musical creations [05:48:00]. This superlinear scaling implies that larger cities become increasingly productive and innovative per capita [06:16:00].
However, negative aspects also scale superlinearly [20:04:00]. These include:
- Madness and Corruption: Degradation of social institutions [20:09:00].
- Crime: Urban crime rates increase disproportionately with population [20:14:00].
- Sickness: Historically, cities were “net killers of people” until the late 19th century, due to unhealthy conditions [20:18:00].
To deal with these negative superlinear problems, cities require “major institutional upgrades” [21:14:00]. Examples include the Victorian transition, which saw the invention of urban policing and massive investments in sewage infrastructure to combat crime and disease in cities like London [21:24:00]. These upgrades are hard, risky, and often resisted, but they allow cities to grow larger [23:29:00].
Drivers of City Scaling
The superlinear scaling in cities is hypothesized to be linked to increasing connectivity, analogous to Metcalfe’s Law [07:07:00]. This connection suggests that information transfer, or the “ephemeralization of pattern transmission, formation, and copying,” is a different aspect of reality than energy transfer [08:17:00]. Once a pattern (like calculus) is discovered, its copying and transmission become significantly less expensive than its initial creation [08:42:00].
Historically, mind-to-mind contact primarily required in-person interaction, making embodied collaboration in cities the central driver of civilization and cosmopolitan urbanism [09:24:00]. As cities grew, they faced constraints like feeding, watering, and housing large populations, leading to solutions across three regimes:
- Technologies of Density: Innovations like the elevator allowed for higher population density within the same physical space [12:21:00].
- Transportation: Technologies like trains and streetcars virtualized space by increasing travel velocity, expanding the effective urban environment [13:34:00].
- Ephemeralization of Communication: This involves reducing the need for physical proximity for communication. Examples include:
- Messengers [13:59:00]
- Writing [14:10:00]
- Printing press, telegram, telephone, television [14:52:00]
The Shift to Civium
The concept of civium arises from a tipping point in the ephemeralization of communication, where the quality of digital-mediated collaboration becomes comparable to or exceeds in-person collaboration [15:02:00].
Digital Tipping Point
Unlike analog media, digital technology can produce all forms of media, acting as a lower-level substrate [15:48:00]. This capacity allows for the exploration of all possible forms of mediation. Hall suggests this tipping point may have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced people to develop digital communication capacities [16:53:00]. Technologies like the Apple Vision Pro represent a significant “step function” in virtualizing relationality [17:50:00]. Demographic shifts, with Gen Z having a different relationship to the virtual than older generations, also contribute to this transition [18:14:00].
This shift in the “center of gravity” towards the virtual implies a “massive decoupling of the body and the mind” [25:22:00]. Collaborative capacity will increasingly migrate to the virtual realm, which can connect more minds than any physical city [25:35:00]. Consequently, cosmopolitan urban environments may become “superlinearly less attractive” as their good aspects decline while the negative aspects of population remain [25:55:00].
Unlocking Human Potential
The shift to civium is seen as an opportunity to reclaim human elements sacrificed during the arc of civilization [26:08:00]. Cities have historically been unhealthy for minds (leading to insanity, depression) and bodies, and have necessitated cultural artifacts that subordinate human needs to scaling [26:21:00].
Civium aims to return to the “meso-scale” of community, where people live in groups of 50-500, fostering strong bonds, mutual care, and a deeper sense of meaningfulness [28:51:00]. This contrasts with modern society’s reliance on anonymous and sterile relationships with the market and government [29:32:00].
Characteristics of Civium
Civium represents a fundamental shift from “quantity to quality,” or from “scaling heaps to growing living things” [30:36:00].
Metcalfe’s Law and Attention Curation
While Metcalfe’s Law describes the potential value of a network, the actual value depends on the quality of point-to-point connections [31:32:00]. In a civium, algorithms should be optimized for “human well-being within planetary limits,” rather than solely for revenue generation [32:51:00]. This allows for the curation of attention towards the “highest quality relationships” and generative dialogue, surfacing truth and insight [32:20:00].
Topological Structure
Civium is envisioned with a specific topological structure:
- Downward Direction: Humans migrate to “human-scale, humane, embodied congregations,” ideally around Dunbar numbers (approx. 150 people) [34:45:00]. This involves long-term embodiment in specific locations to foster care for the place and adaptation [35:03:00].
- Upward Direction: A focus on the “quality dimension of the virtual,” changing algorithms to prioritize high-quality relationality among individuals and fostering truth and generative dialogue [36:02:00].
- Intermediary Layer: The relationship between the physical and virtual realms, requiring “technology hygiene” and cultural constructs to ensure healthy interactions [40:01:00].
This dual development of embodied communities and quality-driven virtual spaces offers a “tremendous” and potentially multiplicative upside, leading to healthier people, stronger relationships, and richer meaning [39:19:00].
Challenges in Transitioning to Civium
Building civium is challenging, requiring simultaneous change in both individuals and institutional structures [42:43:00]. Attempts to build early-stage civium (or “Proto B’s”) have faced difficulties [45:02:00].
Key challenges include:
- Difficulty in Sustaining Personal Change: Individuals who can independently adopt new values are rare [45:47:00]. Without supporting institutional structures, maintaining new habits is nearly impossible [43:31:00].
- Lack of Aligned Hierarchy of Values: Cosmopolitan urbanism often leads to a “lowest common denominator” of values, making it difficult to form deep, enduring bonds needed for true communities [47:11:00].
- Complexity of Fabricating Wholesome Social Environments: Intentional communities struggle to innovate culture from scratch, unlike historical colonies that copied existing functional cultural toolkits [50:16:00]. Modern cultural toolkits are often dysfunctional, making it necessary to “revivify” existing wholesome elements rather than creating entirely new ones [51:26:00].
The Role of Religion and Spirituality
The challenges in building civium led to a re-evaluation of the role of religion, which provides the institutional structures for cultivating communities with strong bonds and shared values [53:27:00].
Reconceptualizing Core Concepts
Hall’s journey involved re-examining terms like spirituality, religion, and faith, noting that contemporary secular understanding of these terms is often impoverished or inverted [55:28:00].
- Spirituality: Relates to the “deep self,” healing traumas, and deepening one’s capacity for meaningfulness in life [57:19:00].
- Egregor: Explores agency and identity at different scales, acknowledging non-human agents but distinguishing them from individual persons [58:51:00].
- Religion: Encompasses liturgy (communion, collective work), hierarchy of values (what people orient their life energy towards), and rituals (scaffolding to live by values and respond to reality) [01:01:54].
Personal Transformation and Christian Faith
Hall’s personal journey led him to embrace Christian faith, driven by the profound experience of healthy, vital, and wholesome community in a local church [01:13:05]. This challenged his previous agnostic stance and led him to take Christianity seriously, engaging deeply with scripture, theology, and historical perspectives [01:19:50].
Key tenets of his new faith include:
- Personal God: Belief in one living and true God who is an intelligent, spiritual, and personal being [01:17:44].
- Trinity: The understanding that the Triune God describes the “most compact, necessary, and sufficient components of any possible reality,” making it a philosophical and theological truth [01:24:10].
- Relationality as Ontological Primitive: The essence of the Triune God is pure relationality, where relationship is more fundamental than relata (individual entities) [01:26:49].
- Man as Special Creation: Belief that man is God’s special creation, made in His image, though not necessarily subscribing to a young-earth creationist interpretation [01:35:05].
- Gender Roles: Adherence to traditional gender roles where a wife submits to the “servant leadership” of her husband, which implies the husband’s responsibility to embody Christ’s sacrificial love [01:36:05].
- Abortion as Murder: Viewing abortion as a sin equivalent to murder [01:37:14].
- Biblical Inerrancy: Belief that the Holy Bible is divinely inspired, God’s perfect revelation, and truth without error, understood through deep hermeneutics and personal growth [01:41:47].
- Christian Social Order: Obligation for Christians to make the will of Christ supreme in their lives and society, working to bring all aspects of society under principles of righteousness, truth, and love, though this explicitly opposes theocracy and respects “soul sovereignty” (God-granted autonomy of each individual’s soul) [01:44:16].
This commitment highlights a shift from seeking to construct new societal governance from scratch to recognizing and aligning with existing, time-tested frameworks that foster genuine human well-being and community [01:51:26]. Hall’s journey emphasizes a profound personal transformation, moving from a purely intellectual and design-oriented approach to one rooted in lived experience and faith, as a means to engage with societal challenges and contribute to a more positive future of civilization.