This week two of the most interesting thinkers of the internet era,
Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum) and
Tanner Greer (
much discussed in TiB), posted new essays on the topic of legitimacy. They’re very different, but worth reading in parallel.
Greer’s essay,
“On Laws and Gods”, is a whirlwind tour across millennia and continents that looks at the question, where have people believed that legitimate authority comes from? Riffing on - and arguing with -
Hannah Arendt, Greer shows that the historical and global norm has been “authority from the absolute” - e.g. authority from God, natural law or “self-evident truths”. The exceptions, such as ancient Athens, are notable partly for their rarity. Towards the end of the essay Greer makes a particularly important point:
Public freedom has many enemies, but few harder to slay than size… When politics grows beyond the human scale, polities must nail themselves to an authority beyond the human
As I’ve argued
before, the defining characteristic of the internet age is scale. So where can legitimacy come from today, in a globalised world with dwindling faith in absolutes? One
popular trope in the crypto world is that Bitcoin and its brethren are backed by (absolute) mathematics, unlike fiat currency backed by fickle politics. This is not the line Buterin takes, though.
His excellent essay highlights that even blockchain-based ecosystems rely on a social contract to confer legitimacy. Without legitimacy, even math(s) can be “undone” - there are no quick fixes. As Greer concludes:
Let us hope the search for the gods that might uphold our coming laws will treat us kinder than they did the the men and women who lived through that last upheaval