Remix clone Hacker News

> 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.

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.

▲

big-green-man 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

We have a world run by cliques right now. Where we had guilds, now we have unions. Corporations, "the intelligence community", "healthcare workers", there are lots of different groups in society that often wild unique, real power and exercise it. What keeps the show going is the illusion of egalitarianism and individualism. When a healthcare company lobbies for laws that make them more money, the healthcare workers clique benefits, so they support it. There are a lot of perverse incentives when you combine cliques and a central lever of power that can be corrupted, not as many when where power resides and where people think it resides look like the same picture.

▲

nopinsight 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Freedom of association means that a clique does not have absolute power over you, right? Competition implies that cliques incompatible with most people’s values will wither.

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).

▲

glitchc 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I have no problem with cliques by way of freedom of association. But we have tried running society through cliques, and in all cases, what you end up with are variations of the mafia or worse.

	▲	nopinsight 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Modern colleges, startup incubators, professional associations are some examples of cliques that are better than mafia. I guess a key is that these cliques do not completely encompass every aspect of a member's life and do not use violence as a means to enforce their rules.

▲

llamaimperative 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

In practice cliques have the same benefits to agglomeration that e.g. corporations and proto-governments do. So freedom of association can’t exist in practice for very long, at least not freedom to associate with multiple effectively-equal cliques.

▲

nopinsight 3 days ago | parent [-]

Cliques will certainly differ from one another and are likely to be unequal, much like “soft cliques” already exist today in larger cities. The question is more about how much power a clique should have and how exclusive and encompassing its membership should be, e.g., whether a person can belong to multiple cliques.

	▲	llamaimperative 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The issue (and why states exist) is that powerful cliques end up doing bad things to other less powerful cliques, and usually the dimension of “power” that matters is not the one that you want actually making decisions broadly (e.g. who can be the most brutal and aggressive toward outsiders).

▲

fellowniusmonk 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Pillarization died for a reason.