The Construction of the Post-Civilizational Civium Has Begun
Why the confederation of more than a dozen translocal popup villages in Chiang Mai is a historical pivot
Civium is a concept developed by Jordan Greenhall, which I interpret as meaning a trans-local, post-civilizational world order that is organized through trans-local instead of local principles.
Jordan explains it as follows:
"The innovation of the printing press massively increased the communicative capacity of Western civilization and radically rebalanced the psychocultural sensibility of the West. But, even then, the majority of communication was face to face and the center of collaboration was grounded in physical proximity. Until recently. … The invention and development of “the digital” brings an end to the cultural logic of the city that has been driving civilization since the beginning. We are now exiting the epoch of the city and entering the epoch of a new relationship. The civium.”
Giles Fraser puts it somewhat more prosaically:
"Civium is a way of looking at cities, and specifically what a post-city world might look like. It imagines an alliance between technology and the countryside replacing the city as the focus of creativity and wealth-creation. It is the idea that there is no longer much point living in the middle of a large conurbation when you can now move out, look at fields through your window, breathe clean air, and do all your meetings with video conferencing. "
Jordan Greenhall's rationale for the shift to this model refers to the landmark book by Geoffrey West, called Scale.
West distinguishes sublinear relationships, in which scaling leads to a loss of efficiency, from superlinear relationships, in which scaling increases efficiency. An example of the first is the human body, whereby a doubling of a baby’s bodily size, only creates an 85% increase in the size of the brain. But a city is super-linear, as regards its innovation capacity, and this is of course related to the exponential rise in networked relationships that it enables. Doubling a city’s population leads to a 115% increase in innovation and productivity.
This is why cities have been the crucial aspect of civilization-building, once it made its appearance about 5,000 years ago.
This is NOT trivial. Civilization <is> a geographic relationship, between a rural hinterland producing food, and a city using that food to produce a managerial class. We can also consider a civilizational regime as a particular arrangement between matter and energy, which is bound by information and communication technology. This is why the evolution of media, from the invention of writing, through the invention of the alphabet, through printing, electronic media and finally the digital networks of the internet, have led to huge increases in productivity, overall human wealth, and the speed of innovation.
Civilization is of course much more than that. As Keith Chandler would have it, in his marvelous book ‘Beyond Civilization’, which already discusses post-civilizational potentials, a civilization possesses the following characteristics:
"There are at least eight principal attributes that clearly characterize all civilized societies:
1. A hierarchical social organization dominated by a power elite which is not accountable to the powerless majority and for whose actions there is little or no redress.
2. Concentration of power and wealth in fortified urban centers.
3. Written language, the understanding and use of which are monopolized by the elite and its functionaries.
4. An economic system which vests title to the wealth produced by the society in the elite and controls that wealth by a strictly measured allocation of all industrial, agricultural, forestry, and mining resources within the control of the central power.
5. Skills, training, and labor specialization designed to serve the goals of the power elite.
6. Extensive slavery or serfdom.
7. A grand mythology portraying society as originating from and continuing to be influenced by suprahuman powers with the elite as the conduit of that influence.
8. A military establishment which is utilized not only for external defense and aggression but also for internal control and repression of the dispossessed majority."
Changing the territorial logic of a civilization, will have effects on many of these characteristics, and I would outline some of the current challenges to the civilizational model:
It was born out of a necessity, desire and choice, to master natural processes. But the market and state form of civilization has always led to an overuse of its local resource bases, hence cycles of emergence of decline. Planetarization has led to a crisis of global overuse, which will require specific solutions, and likely both a global social contract, new forms of multilateral governance, and a new relationship to the non-human natural world.
Civilization benefits core populations at the detriment of a periphery, which leads to proletarianization, discontent and social unrest. The current competition between the market-centric Western alliance and the state-centric East Eurasian alliance of Russia and China with the BRICS countries of the Global South, is challenging the current geopolitical world order.
The current crisis of the U.S.-led hegemonic world order, the last phase of a model of Western domination that emerged in the 16th century, therefore requires social, ecological, and geopolitical reorganization. But in our context, what matters is the new adjustment that is required between the geographic order of civilization, and the trans-local order of the Civium. Our future depends on a new articulation of both. Note of course that this challenge is not entirely new. Religions were already trans-local structures, and had community leaders that were responsible for a community of faith, which didn’t coincide with territorial logic. Think of the Catholic Pope, heading not just the Christians within the Roman Empire, but also beyond, and the similar role of a Caliph. Medieval Europe represented a potential interpenetration of geographic and non-territorial cultural rule, but which was upended by the nation-state model. We are at the cusp of a new iteration of that model, hence the frequent talk of ‘neo-medievalism’.
Here is my interpretation of the three models current at play in our geopolitical world order, inspired by the theoretization of Mark Stahlman of the Center for the Study of Digital Life, and by the work of Michael Hudson:
• The East is the state-sovereignist option, born with the civilizational states that replace kinship-based tribalism, and their Axial Age ethics. In this model, a public institution, the state, is paramount to keep the peace in a society based on classes and a division of labor. Michael Hudson shows how the imperial form dominated the eastern side of the Eurasian continent for several millennia, allowing for sometimes dynamic markets, but keeping them in check, especially the ‘creditor class’, by instituting Clean State Legislation and Jubilees which protected the internal populations from slavery and bondage. Even today, Russia and China have strong states that substantially control the capitalist forces and prevent their full autonomy. This bloc may be in the process of updating the ‘Western’ Wesphalian model of the nation-state, with the adapted model of the ‘Civilization State’.
• The ‘Western’ way started when the creditor class took power in Greece, and this created a revolt that invented political democracy in the Greek polis. In other words, the system was based on maritime power, the domination of trade routes, the power of the creditor class but mitigated by the counter-institutions of the plebs, creating a system of assemblies and democracy. Rome’s tribunate co-existed with the domination of the propertarian patrician class, and persisted in medieval law, eventually allowing the bourgeoisie to emancipate itself in the free cities, and to create a capitalist world in its image. This ongoing struggle has produced WWI, which eliminated the imperial form; WWII in which new state sovereignist challenges endangered the hegemony of parliamentary democracy (fascism and Stalinism). The West at first subdued the Soviet system, but China found the formula to use the benefits of market dynamics without its state being overrun with it. With the capitalist crisis of 2008, western neoliberalism’s hegemony ended, creating a ‘multi-polar’ world, where again, the two systems are battling it out in Ukraine, and Russia has joined the state-sovereignist axis.
• The Digital Sphere however stands for the third coordination system, that of mutual coordination or stigmergy. Stigmergy stands for mutual coordination through signaling in open ecosystems. Its emergence started with the universalization of open-source dynamics, which is the capacity to coordinate human labor, trans-locally, at a global scale. For example, this capacity strongly contributed to the emergence of Chinese manufacturing dominance through the Shanzhai production system which is based on open-source collaboration ‘inside’ the Chinese networks. The market-state synthesis of China has strong cybernetic features as well. The challenge posed by cybernetics has previously destroyed the Soviet system, which had failed to adapt to the cybernetic potential.
(see Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford, for how the Russians invented and then destroyed their internet, signing their death warrant; and Evgeny Morozov’s podcast series on the Santiago Boys, and their failed Cybersin experiment in Chile, which nevertheless created the basis for the neoliberal globalization of supply chains).
In a second period, the Digital created the Crypto Upgrade. Despite, or perhaps ‘because of’ its libertarian and propertarian biases, it has created the first of many socially sovereign currencies that operate non-territorially outside of single state and corporate control; it has created a powerful business model to supercharge open source modes of production. It signifies the shift towards open ecosystemic collaboration across borders. What Crypto, i.e. Web3 has brought to the table, is the financing of globally coordinated work. Bitcoin at first created the first global currency that was not dependent on a State or a private market player, but it also created the blockchain, the first ever universal ledger, i.e. a open accounting system that everyone can join and allows for the mutual coordination of not just flows of money, but also of work and material resources.
This work if of course far from over, as the overwhelming majority of Web3 (i.e. Crypto) practices are not yet involved in physical production but rather in globalizing the mutual production of open code.
Nevertheless, the Digital Sphere creates the conditions for a civilizational shift towards a ‘fourth’ form of Civilization (after hunter-gathering, craft-agrarian, industrial), or ‘Post-Civilization’, what I’d like to call the Cosmo-Local Civilization, where ‘everything that is heavy is local, and everything that is light is global and shared’, i.e. the combination of relocalized distributed manufacturing, thermodynamically informed of its material limitations, coupled with trans-local protocols that govern the common rules of cooperation.
What has Chiang Mai, the wonderful city in the North of Thailand to do with these momentous historical developments? It is not just, in a way, the geographic center of the most populated part of the world. It is also, right now, the spiritual capital of digital nomadism.
The best way to explain this is to point out that the emergence and growth of cosmically coordinated work, has created a new sociology, that of digital nomads, which are estimated to be at 34 million at present. Within that sphere, at least 5 million, but probably a lot more, have access to digital wallets using crypto currencies through which they get paid for their work. That amount of people is NOT trivial. For the non-technical people, I should perhaps also explain that, once the blockchain was created as a side effect of the Bitcoin currency, a network project was created, to create an entire computing infrastructure based on this blockchain. This was the work of a Russian coder, Vitalik Buterin, and it has evolved to a very large community of coders.
While being a digital nomad has many advantages, i.e. the freedom to work in the nicer places of our world, it comes with psychological and social challenges, one of them being the need for friendships, relationships, and a common culture. It is this challenge that Vitalik Buterin wanted to address by creating the first ‘Pop Up’ village, in Montenegro, in April 2023, called Zuzalu. Even as I was quite skeptical and critical at the time about the Web3 community, I was also quite taken by the level of cooperation, mutual solidarity and pluralistic exchange that I witnessed in this first temporary village, which lasted for two months. Afterwards, I attended ZuConnect in Istanbul, and Edge City Esmeralda in Healdsburg, California. In that last experience, one thousand people gathered for a whole month, with on average seventeen events per day. Imagine the level of interconnection, and mutual learning that takes place in such a context.
In other words, we now center back to the topic which started this article: these popup villages have emerged as a specific form taken by the Civium. The success of this model was such that the number of villages started exploding, and it is out of this explosion that the Chiang Mai gathering emerged in turn.
For those not familiar with Chiang Mai, it was already a favorite place for digital nomads before the Covid years, but once Covid subsided, its attractiveness exploded again. So this October, at least a dozen of such popup villages converged towards the city, not just organizing events ‘on their own’, but interconnecting in a ‘confederation’ following the Archipelago model, once theorized by Edouard Glissant. So think again of the 17 learning experiences per day that were organized by Edge City Esmeralda; think of a dozen groups doing the same, and think about their interconnection. Chiang Mai, as we speak, is a cauldron of collaboration, creating friendships, a common culture, and intensive collective learning. In other words, perhaps never before has such an intense ‘scenius’ been created, the concept used by Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno to denote the collective conditions necessary for individual innovation to emerge.
Here is Brian Eno on the characteristics of Scenius:
"Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
Individuals immersed in a productive scenes will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenes, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you."
The geography of a scenes is nurtured by several factors:
Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success. (Collective Epic Wins!)
Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone."
So this is my conclusion about what is happening in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand: we have witnessed the birth and the consolidation of the Scenius of the Civium. With several dozen events per day, it’s hard to settle on common themes, but I want to give a sense of what is being discussed here, by the emerging Network Nations that are present. I specifically mention Network Nations to indicate the ambition of various groups, to be much more than just communities of professionals, but that they desire to experiment and create new ways of life, a new culture, and yes, a new form of civilization. Of course, many challenges remain, and Web3 is still largely divorced from the necessary link to productive communities and real physical production, but nevertheless, there is a high awareness of the seriousness of the task ahead.
Here is just one example, the concerns of one of the groups present there, the Lovepunks (not to be confused with the Solarpunks and Lunarpunk communities, also present). We are not talking of geeks here, but of a complex population engaged in early forms of civilizational and culture creation:
“How can art serve as a bridge between modern globalized culture and indigenous traditions that are at risk of being erased?
In what ways can cultural rituals help us reclaim collective memory in a world dominated by technology and short attention spans?
How do ancient rituals around love and community bonding hold relevance in today’s fast-paced, individualistic societies?
What role does love play in shaping collective movements for social change, especially in times of crisis?
How can models of cooperativism and collectivism survive and thrive in a system dominated by capitalism? Can they be effectively scaled globally?
What are the potential synergies between collectivism and modern technology, like decentralized systems or DAOs?
How do you envision a post-capitalist world, and what steps can we take to get closer to it without replicating the same power structures?
In an age of global crisis, is the role of the state becoming obsolete, or does it need to be redefined? How can states evolve to support more cooperative forms of governance?
How should states navigate their responsibilities in preserving cultural traditions while also embracing modernity?
How can religious traditions coexist and evolve with modern spiritual movements, especially in secular or multicultural contexts?
What role does spirituality play in the collective consciousness of societies facing identity crises?
As global identities shift, how can we foster a sense of unity while respecting the diversity of cultures and identities around the world?
How does the rise of individual identity politics impact collective action and movements for systemic change?
In an age of identity fragmentation, how do you think we can cultivate a more unified global consciousness without erasing individual or cultural identities?
How can we use art, traditions, and rituals to help individuals and communities navigate existential or identity crises?”
I am of course not claiming that all present here in my home town of Chiang Mai, have all the answers, but that they are seeking answers to such deep questions of the future life on Earth, is not trivial.
So I’ll end with this suggesting:
Imagine the emergence of hundreds of such groups on the planet
Imagine a substantial fraction of these groups converging in Chiang Mai, learning from each other in intense ways, creating friendships, a common culture, and seeking for worldview convergence
Imagine these re-energized individuals and communities going back to their nomadic homes, intensely re-energized by what they have experienced, further seeding the culture amongst their friends and associates.
This hopefully gives you an idea of the power of the experience that has happened here,
Elsewhere, I have provoked some by calling Web3 a community of faith, but hear me out:
Civilizations can only be based on spirituality, because rationality can only be based on fundamental non-rational axioms, which religions provided for their civilization constructors
When, originally in the West, we became secular, these values were at first translated by messianic secular movements, which wanted to created a better world on earth, in the future; this gave rise to the mass movements of industrial society; and they were, in a sense, secular communities of faith, moved by unconscious spiritual drives
Today, we see the emergence of networked and constructive communities, writing the very code that determines their lifestyles, economics, and self-governance, with a shared belief in the need for decentralization. They are the current form of a pluralistic coalition and in some fundamental way, the present form of a community of faith. They are constructing, in substantial ways, the world of tomorrow.
The people here, despite the bad reputation of crypto in the mainstream press, were not people seeking profit, they were and are in the business of world-creation. You better pay attention.
The Civium has been born. And it will continue to grow.
I've just scanned your article. So, I need to dive more deeply, but, at first glance, as a long time Chiang Mai resident, this isn't my experience of the city. It is, by far, my favorite city (in my favorite country) in the world, but, as I can gather for different (or at least overlapping) reasons.
In a very basic sense, it's the garden city, walkability of it infused with a deep sense of community, friendliness, face-to-face human interactions, and overflowing of life and culture from every nook and cranny. I often joke with friends when I see banyan trees growing out of the side of commercial buildings or recently abandoned houses covered with thick vegetation that when push comes to shove in Chiang Mai the jungle always wins. City = 0; Jungle = ∞.
Which brings me to a more abstract sense of why I love this city. It is the most, maybe the only, city that has ever really felt integral to me. Integral in the sense that everything from the archaic up to the post-modern seems to be living side by side. Occupying the same space. Everywhere. Paying street food vendors with QR code, who source from local wet-markets. Their stalls nestled in the shade of ancient old trees wrapped in animistic ribbons leaning on the side of centuries old buddhist temples. That happen to be a stone-throw away from red-light districts where another type of vendor lights incense and provide food and drink in tiny little shrines for the ancestors residing there before engaging in the world's oldest profession. These district themselves nestled in the shade of modern high-rises & malls. Motorbikes, Tuk Tuks, Rod Daengs, ad Grab. Overlapping circles of conveniences. Sois crossing each other creating corners of mutually supporting and relatively boundary free commerce. Buy moo dad deaw here. A Leo there. Bring them together to watch some locals and farangs enjoy a game of pool and sharing life's little pleasures and pains.
Information dense and scale free. Walking 15 minutes across Chiang Mai's city center is like driving hours in other metropolises I've visited.
It might be that were pointing at similar phenomena with different terms and experiences. Or, something I've been pondering a lot recently, is how the same physical local can host multiple cultural layers that don't even see each other. Living amongst ghosts.
Dear Michel, thank you for this highly interesting analysis of the current social dynamics related to the macro-transitions in global political and cultural systems in recent history, as well as the opportunities and challenges related to Web3, crypto and digital nomadism. Your outlook and prognosis are inspiring and give hope in a world that seems to be falling into a more than medieval darkness. I really like the idea of civium, especially “everything that is hard is local, and everything that is easy is global and shared”, and I am glad to hear that these forms of shaping social life are emerging not only in Thailand but in many other places around the world. However, I think one thing is missing from your analysis and outlook: psychotrauma. As a psychiatrist, addiction specialist and psychotraumatologist, I am convinced that the cause of our current meta-crisis lies in the ignorance and thus repetition of countless traumatic dynamics in almost all human societies around the globe. I think it is fair to say that we live in a deeply destructive culture based on trauma-based mind control: we adapt to and identify with violence because we have experienced violence (at least in the form of profound neglect of our basic needs: physical integrity, sexual reproduction and bonding with peers). Furthermore, we are both threatened by violence (being socially ostracized and forced out of the food supply as soon as we do not conform to predetermined social norms) and seduced by the illusion of control, power, pleasure and prosperity. Thus, we are living in a crisis of consciousness as we have forgotten and lost the connection to our true human nature and potential. This is what I try to convey in my work, and I would be delighted if awareness of the traumatic roots of our current crisis were put a little more on the agenda of the many - highly inspiring and intellectually powerful - movements that are becoming increasingly active around the world. Best wishes from Switzerland, where a scientist discovered LSD through self-experiencing in 1943.