I have started reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb (review coming when I am done with it). As an early example of a system that gets better under stress he mentions city states (presumably as they existed in ancient Greece).
At USV we have been thinking about jurisdictional competition as a way to run more experiments during a time of change. We have focused on small countries such as Iceland and Singapore which might pass progressive Internet legislation but there are relatively few of those. In the US, we have 50 States and that might be a better starting point. So maybe the right thing to do here would be to build a broad coalition for pushing a lot more regulation back from the federal level to the state level.
What is really influencing my thinking here is the progress that we have made with gay marriage. In the DOMA discussion at SCOTUS, some judges are coming at it from an equal protection angle and others from a States’ rights perspective but that may result in a large a coalition. Maybe the right way forward is to go back to breaking up some huge federal programs into smaller state programs and then get 50 parallel experiments going.
This could also be an interesting way for advancing the peer progressive agenda. Some states will be more welcoming than others to the use of peer networks as a way of organizing society.
