Patchwork city states ?

With State capacity decline and movement of decentralization how probable is it that we see something like sov corp city states emerging ? First through corporations providing private security (I think this is already the case in Brazil to some extent) eventually owning the monopoly of violence over some territory and taking on more and more civil functions (with private healthcare, private education and so on being leveraged by other corporations or individuals under the protection of private security forces). Does AGI change anything in this calculus? Will we see AGI augmented city states & xenohumans competing with each other and rebirth the classical age of Greece, the high middle ages, Renaissance Venice ? If not what would impede these developments ? Are there any centralizing forces at play that I am overlooking ?

>>3050
I think the key problem is that in mr Burja's "empire theory" terminology, you are describing a decentralized declining empire, but what we actually have is a centralized declining empire. In decentralized decline, pieces break off and become free of the former system of coordination and taxation. But in centralized decline, the pieces and peoples that might be independent powers are strangled to death to squeeze the last bit of blood and threat out of them, while the whole systems rots into parasitism and loss of ability to do anything but squeeze its healthy parts.

Brazil, India, South Africa tier anarchy aren't the kind where sovcorps and formalized medium-scale powers come from. Rather the favela becomes the background for petty informal kin networks ripping the copper out of the walls of the last remaining civilized order, while anyone who tries to organize serious legible formalized civilization gets crushed by the remaining centralized security apparatus, which now exists only for this purpose. The parasites are the political clients of the declining centralized empire and tools against the remaining civilized peoples and institutions within it, because the imperial center has lost the ability to lead those "mid-level powers" and is now threatened by their strength.

This isn't to say we shouldn't try. It's possible an entrepreneural mid-power could actually break out of the longhouse and usher in an age of true diversity of powers, but it may be just as possible to pull off a centralized revolution to get back to leading and rehabilitating civilization within the empire. Maybe those are the same thing. A strong will can overcome almost any situation, but I don't think anything "interesting" is going to happen by default. We will have to make it so.

>>3052

That is all fair but don't centralized declining empires eventually turn into decentralized declining ones ? I fail to see how States can maintain current levels of penetration and extension of power given demographic trends, state expenditures, debt to GDP ratio, etc.

>>3053
>don't centralized declining empires eventually turn into decentralized declining ones ?

Most frequently, a centralized declining empire will stagnate for a very long time—there's a lot of ruin in a nation. Then eventually it's weak enough that someone from outside can knock it over, like Alaric or Alexander or the East India Company.

>>3053
Eventually the system fails, but only after the substrate. The taxation and political security logic is the last to go. The parts have become dependent on the system, and molded by the system to lack the capacity to rebel. The system only dies because it kills them, at which point there’s nothing left to break out. Analogize to a dying animal: by the time the system dies, none of its cells can survive outside. Unlike say a dying forest. Civilization is somewhere in between. The result is what the other anon says >>3054.

Moldbug’s “passivism” is an interesting take on strategy against this: dont directly fight the system, but rather try to appear as no threat while actually building capacity. But this is unfortunately indistinguishable in practice from some kind of surrender or rebellion. Not clear there actually is a third way.

That everything fails is not an argument. Everything eventually fails and dies.

>>3050
>With State capacity decline and movement of decentralization how probable is it that we see something like sov corp city states emerging ?
We see it already with today's tech companies, to an extent: the US government shuts down nuclear power plants while GOOGL and MSFT plan on building their own nuclear power plants, facilitating their respective AGI plans.

Sovereign companies aren't a new idea. Walt Disney had his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), which was seen as corporate heaven: housing, amenities, k-12 education, careers—essentially corporate-style colonization of land. EPCOT was never built, but it combines city-planning with corporate-planning, building an endless amount of, in theory, genetic talent for the corporation.

Corporations today just kinda skip the city-building part and just open up shop at the heart of cities, fund whatever educational institutions are nearby (Amazon, for example, funds University of Washington) to attain talent, and so long as business is booming, career optionality booms as well.

Will we see corporations start developing their own private military to attain true sovereignty? I think that depends on how deeply the corporation wants to vertically integrate their supply chains, starting with raw materials. This again is not a new idea: I believe the Dutch East India Company had its own private army and private navy to protect its supply chains, attain new raw materials, and colonize land.

>Does AGI change anything in this calculus? Will we see AGI augmented city states & xenohumans competing with each other and rebirth the classical age of Greece, the high middle ages, Renaissance Venice ?
I think that answer is yes. We already see autonomous factories; they're (retardedly) called dark factories. I would not be surprised if we start seeing autonomous islands dedicated to refining raw materials or producing trinkets and gadgets, all with their own autonomous defense systems. In some sense, the US gov (I know the topic is about sovcorp) seeks to make all 11 of its supercarriers into autonomous floating factories that rapidly produce drones to combat China's military advantage of proximity and mass. It's called the Replicator Initiative.

Corporations will have similar plans, and we see that already, with Amazon purchasing Kiva—a robotics company—to specifically design robots for Amazon warehouses. It would be a question of design and scale to produce defense systems.

I'm not too sure about the AGI angle. Whoever achieves the first design will probably have an edge: larger corporation have better odds at both developing the first designs and have better odds at scaling at the physical realm. The true winner will probably be the corporation that develops the closest to the "last" design of ASI, thus eliminating the need to iterate.

>If not what would impede these developments ?
It's interesting because you could probably separate people into a 2x2 matrix of possible-impossible and desirable-undesirable:

1. Things are *possible* and *undesirable*
- This group of people will be the largest adherents to such developments. Enemies are here.

2. Things are *possible* and *desirable*
- This group of people are the ones who will make theory into reality. Friends and allies are found here.

3. Things are *impossible* and *undesirable*
- This group of people are probably the most wrong. Because they see such things as impossible, they won't go out of their way to stop you because it's "impossible." And not only do they see things as impossible, they see things as undesirable too, in which case, they arrogantly proclaim that things won't exist in the first place: "It's impossible, and there's no need for it!" they might say.

4. Things are *impossible* and *desirable*
- This group of people are the fanboys. Consider them as friends and allies too.

This matrix may represent a vast array categories: from politics, economics, philosophies, and more.