Network States

One thing that frustrates me about "my culture is better than yours" discourse, is that the game inherently drives people to come up with post-hoc justifications for why their fixed pre-existing thing is better than the other guy's fixed pre-existing thing.

This is not a productive enterprise. It's completely missing the part where if you realize that some aspect your pre-existing thing sucks, you can actually go and change it and make it better. Compete by offering a better product, not by offering a better justification for a product you were randomly assigned by birth lottery.

One of the things that attracted me about network states, is that productive cultural competition that leads to innovation in new and better cultures could actually happen there, and in environments "holistic" enough to capture all aspects of culture that are necessary to run a functioning civilization (as opposed to narrow environments, eg. cryptocurrencies and games)

I hope we can take that open-minded approach more.