Ep. 31: Max Borders on Decentralization, Social Evolution and New Organisational Models for Firms, DAOs and Countries

Max Borders is an author and public intellectual. He wrote books like "The Social Singularity" and "After Collapse". He is also Executive Director at Social Evolution, a non-profit organization dedicated to solving social problems through innovation.

We start the conversation by discussing competitive governance and using "exit" to improve existing institutions. Max views existing institutions as increasingly ossifying due to their monopolistic nature coupled with high switching costs.

This DOS operating system is holding back humans from technological and spiritual progress. For example, the "welfare-warfare" state has increasingly replaced mutual aid organizations and thereby outsourced community care.

We further talk about how both centralizing and decentralizing pressures influence how large organizations become (Ronald Coase's "theory of the firm"), the concept of holacracy, and how alternative forms of governance such as DAOs (digital autonomous organizations) provide a useful avenue for experimentation.

Towards the end, Max talks about his new project of a "Shadow Constitution" that's taking the work of Balaji Srinivasan's "The Network State" further.

Max plans to provide the "ought" to Balaji's "is".

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