If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology.
The ideas of the critiqued person in this piece draw heavily from these ideas, and their writings are less so "one commandment states" and more so an exploration of the types of nation-like organizations that can emerge from some of the new technologies enabled by global networking and Turing complete computation. The critiqued individual predicts the collapse of the state as we know it today, where people are "owned" from birth and resources are owned and managed primarily for the continuation of state power. He sees this as a good thing, a thing that will finally empower human beings to choose their tribe, to form tribes as they see fit, to explore the merits of any and all ideas without taboo, to live their lives autonomously and ultimately live up to each of their own full potential. I generally agree with the premise and related concepts.
The summary I read also mentioned that the death penalty required agreement from both groups - highlighting one of the obvious complexities of such a scheme.
edit: a bit more detail
While it sounds anachronistically enlightened (and very close to an actual historical example of what the TFA intended-- it's not very often that we harvest anything from "truth is stranger than [especially science] fiction")--
--the death penalty was applied against witchcraft in 1782??
On the whole Switzerland is (today) sort of a Heinleinian (but regrettably (or unsurprisingly?) not Stephensonian) SF setting: peak humanity in hillbilly countrySorry, it was in a museum - https://www.freulerpalast.ch/, which doesn't look like it has that much information online.
Closer to the mark examples are all over the place with different levels of success. The most prominent are the governance structures of multiculutral and multi religious states of south and southeast Asia, Singapore is a prominent oneone, but India and Bangladesh have also adopted similar models to differing degrees. Basically, where multiple ethicities or religions coexist together, their civil and sometimes even criminal law are the laws of their religions or ethnicities, and only when a dispute is between people of disparate groups does some supreme, secular society wide set of laws apply. There are also examples of this throughout Africa, and truly, this is the way most of the world operated for thousands of years before states had defined borders.
Of course, these aren't truly what we are talking about, they're close, but in my examples there is still an overarching state that is arbiter of last resort, and there is nothing voluntary about the associations, they're usually hereditary and imposed by the state with at most an opt out of tribal/religious law. The concept as noted in the diamond age differs in that associations are voluntary (both on the part of the individual as well as the organization) and prominently, you're subject to the law of those you violate, or, if two members of two different groups are in dispute, the dispute and a resolution are handled diplomatically.
Definitely a small geography, and, yes, a solution to a power struggle. I'll point out that large parts of of Europe had rather substantial wars and massacres as part of that specific power struggle, and also that this definitely is "different groups autonomously governing themselves".Landsgemeinde are generally viewed as a prototypical example of that, and there was no significant power over Glarus at that time (the Swiss confederation of that time was extremely far from anything like a central government).
Kudos to Stephenson for inventing a new word that sounds better than the original. Phyles are no different from cliques and suffer from the same problems that cliques do, from an unclear power structure to unwritten rules that are arbitrarily enforced by a capricious "royalty," and in-crowds and out-crowds.
Cliques are great for those inside and terrible for those outside (everyone else). That we have managed to diminish their importance in core pillars of societal function is one of modern civilization's greatest achievements. Going back would not be progress.
You can possibly live in the same house. It’s a bit like changing your insurance company or gym membership but with much larger consequences, if I understand the concept correctly (I’ve never read the novels mentioned).
Diamond Age was presented as less of a dystopia, all those Vickies living in nice places. But the early part of Nell's story is bleak af. Is this really what we want for our future?
This is the Torment Nexus that we were supposed to not be building. It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it.
Yeah it's really scary to me that people are taking all this fiction with bad lessons and trying to make it happen. It feels like they wanna make even more explicit panopticon and call it the eye of sauron.
Reminds me of: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
The reality I want for humanity is one where we aren't born partially enslaved, which almost all human beings are currently. A world of power structures, but where people can choose their tribe, where we aren't subject to the dictates of others as a consequence of the coordinates where we are born, would be a much more free world.