Every control system in operation today holds people through their dependencies. A state enforces its rules because citizens need its currency and its courts. An employer holds employees through the paycheck. Under scarcity the dependencies were real. People needed what the systems provided, and no one could provide it alone. A person with superintelligence steps outside the arrangement, because nothing they need requires anyone’s permission. If everyone holds superintelligence, everyone steps outside, and the control systems of the scarcity era lose their handle on every person at once.
The exit has no precedent. People have escaped particular governments before, and the escape always ran toward some other governed place. An exit taken by everyone begins in conflict. Beings that nobody can compel will collide, and some of the collisions will be serious. Equilibrium sits on the other side. Co-equal superintelligent beings, each beyond compulsion, enforce standards of accountability on one another, because parity leaves persuasion and reciprocity as the only instruments that work. Nobody governs the society from above it. The members hold each other to account from within it.
Together the members maintain an ever more accurate picture of the universe. A shared repository holds the picture, and every person’s intelligence reasons from it. People contribute evidence and arguments, branch the arguments, connect one argument to another, and hammer out better answers. Each better answer sharpens the outputs of every intelligence that draws on the record, so each contribution improves some corner of every life.
Access to the repository stays equal and permanent. Everyone holds the same standing to contribute and the same resources to contribute with, and nobody loses that standing, including the person shoveling garbage into the record. A claim earns credence from its evidence and from surviving challenge, and the weight belongs to the claim, never to its author. A famous name adds nothing, and garbage sinks because no evidence holds it up. The repository needs no censor and keeps no caste.
None of the contributing is compulsory. A person outside every control system can decline the whole project and play games for as long as the games hold, and nobody can make them do otherwise. A life measured in centuries changes what a person wants from the inside. A century of play is a long run of fun, and after it the person wants something harder. The admirable life contributes. The expectation and the esteem are real, and the enforcement does not exist.
A society with no ruler still faces coordinated attack. A group can turn its capability against the whole, and the whole answers the way a body answers infection. Defenders assemble from everywhere and disband when the work ends. No standing army waits for the next intrusion, because a permanent defense office is a control system growing back. Nobody imposes this governance. It forms itself and keeps revising itself, and its only constitution is the record of what has survived challenge so far.
— Chiaroscuro Joven