Ambidextrous Persuasion
A potent persuasion technique from Balaji Srinavasan’s blueprint for a better world, The Network State (TNS), is the power of combining left and right tactics to jumpstart something new. Instead of relying solely on the emotional appeal of moral innovation (the typical leftie call for justice, equity, inclusion, etc.) or only using the efficiency and impact of law, money, science, tech (vectors associated with right-wing rhetoric), TNS makes a case for winning hearts and minds by employing both “word and sword.”
Anyone who has successfully pitched a startup knows that it helps to have both a story of the better world you are setting out to create (left hook) and a to make a cogent case about how new technology, regulation, markets (or all three right jabs) provide strong tailwinds for your venture. The inspiring vision is important because founders needs something more than the possibility of life-changing wealth to keep grinding through the inevitable dark times and an inspiring narrative makes it easier to attract early adopters and collaborators. The ineluctable logic of the opportunity is just as important because it provides the path to the gold through the startup’s idea maze (another Balajism), a step-by-step guide to why your better world will generate big returns for anyone who funds it.
This ambidextrous approach is a great way to check your persuasion default settings. Do you tend to sing the songs of the disenfranchised and underserved to enlist comrades for the new movements you captain? Or do you herd your target audience into a corral of precedent, logic, and power structures. When I raised money for my first bitcoin-connected startup back in 2013, I had slides about the unbanked, cost of remittance, and egregious bank overdraft fees, as well as graphs on bitcoin adoption and a product demo that showed the magic of permissionless decentralized money.
Most of us lean on one technique more than another— story-telling vs. number-crunching— and it’s interesting to experiment with our non-dominant mode. The intersection of left and right innovation— heart-melting memes and cold hard code (legal, software, crypto)— is also where all fast-growing new things call home.
Reluctant Breeders
One subject that isn’t addressed in TNS is family formation to populate all the new polities that spring up as networked communities coalesce around compelling founders and their commandments to take collective action. The tacit assumption is that there are plenty of people to go around at present and that each Startup Society will grow via existing humans embracing dual citizenship, i.e. adding a network state NFT to their nation state passport. But new states won’t be spared the demographic catastrophe of plunging total fertility rates (TFR) and aging population any more than the UN member states. Family formation is an existential issue for every social and political grouping and it’s a subject that would benefit greatly from TNS left/right persuasion technique.
State and god leviathans have always incentivized family formation— via the tax code, traditions, ceremonies. These nudges have proven to be increasingly ineffective against the countervailing forces of feminism, sexual liberation, atheism, price inflation, birth control, and digital media. For the past 50 years, most reproductive age humans have opted to have children much later than their parents or grandparents, or not at all.
A decade ago, I was very reluctant to become a father. I was sure I wasn’t ready. There was so much more I wanted to achieve without the distraction of caring for children. I wasn’t sure how I felt about long-term monogamy. I was scared of getting gutted by divorce. I enjoyed playing the field and forming a family felt much less important than other creative endeavors that I enjoyed: building startups, writing stories, making videos.
Today I have five sons with a sixth on the way and my children (just the thought of them) bring me more joy and pride than anything else I’ve co-founded or created. I became a father (many times over) via a very non-traditional path, mostly by accident, and with few narratives or facts to reassure me that I wasn’t making a huge mistake by signing up for the lifelong commitment of coparenting, cohabitation, and fatherhood.
Can left and right tactics be applied to persuade more singles to form families? The future of TNS (and every other state) depends on it.
Eggs Over Easy
The group that would most benefit from an effective TNS-style left/right rope-a-dope is reproductive age men and women wasting their fertile years on dating apps instead of forming families and making babies.
From data released by Tinder, Hinge, the League, Match, and other dating apps the dystopian dynamics of the modern sexual marketplace have been laid bare. The West Elm Caleb’s enjoy a tyranny of options, even after being group-stigmatized as “fuck boys,” (a vulgar downgrade from “players”), and even publicly “cancelled” for the crime of using dating apps to their advantage. The other 80% of men— call them lesser Calebs or “Meh-lebs”— generate all the dating app revenue, paying for extra swipes and matches, but with moderate to low success or satisfaction. In an age of zero-commitment sexual access, there’s no incentive for the Calebs to “buy the cow,” and Meh-lebs often give up on the game, finding excitement and solace in the fake sex of porn, fake work of video games, and fake community of social media.
Females wading through the modern dating pool have it far worse due to the biodynamics of their much earlier fertility cliff. The most desired women— call them Kweens— might pair off with a committed Caleb, but it’s almost never to make babies. Outside orthodox religious sects, both men and women of all levels of dating app-designated desirability are encouraged to prioritize education, wealth creation, personal development, travel— just about anything and everything— before thinking about forming a family.
And what about the “lesser Kweens”? They match and date and coitus, but soon discover that Calebs and Meh-lebs alike are often commitment-phobic. These ladies bounce among dispiriting nodes of time-wasting situationships, the Caleb carousel, rendering once sacred intimacy generic and once plentiful infants scarce. We all know many women in this category— desperately dating and slowly but surely aging out of motherhood.
The prevailing left stories of female empowerment encourage and celebrate women for playing this game— Tinderella is free, not chattel, potent, not limited by the patriarchy, an evolved girl boss, not a pathetic crib-chained home maker. The right-style rhetoric provides logical lock-in: the higher income of a professional or corporate career provides economic freedom, while babies are burden and diminish disposable income. Reproductive science makes it easy for Tinderella to freeze her eggs (a savvy investment of hard-earned wages) while she waits for some Caleb to surprise her with an engagement ring. She waits and waits.
But he won’t because the stories he hears from the manosphere about family formation mostly concern chumps with one-itis, beta bucks, alpha widows, nasty divorces, alimony payments, and child custody battles. Caleb is actively lured away from commitment by the dating apps. The consequences of divorce law, and family courts aren’t pulling him or the lesser Calebs in the direction of a pair-bonded family.
The future of humanity and the future of thriving multi-generational states depend on better left and right tactics directed at persuading men and women of reproductive age to prioritize family formation.
Age Outs & Opt Outs
This family non-formation problem is a very very painful one for we god-animal homo sapiens sapiens, the most painful problem truly. Life is suffering as the Buddha liked to say, but life without procreating is suffering for nothing, not even to make new and (hopefully) improved vessels for our default existential angst (and perchance enlightenment).
This hand-on-hot-stove level excruciating pain is dampened by the click-on-hot-thumbnail excruciating pleasure of our digital morphine drips. But the pain is compounded by regret, betrayal, heartbreak. And the pleasure that assuages this terrible affliction declines with time as both men and women pass their peak sexual market value and the dating app drip reservoir runs dry. The lesser Kweens and Calebs, the Miderellas, end up with little to show for all their app activity. But the existential pain remains. The fake stuff that distracts them for decades builds up like an ahedonic synaptic plaque, and very quickly and then forever the swiping and clicking loses most of its pleasant surprise. And so the existential lament grows louder with age even after it’s way too late to make babies. The result is, as we are all coming to know, a cohort of very lonely, lost, and disconnected men and women without family, community, or even the occasional thrill of lusty encounter.
None of us were built for a surplus of sex options. We are algorithms of survival crafted by scarcity. Our bodies don’t know when to stop eating, scrolling, swiping, grazing. Caleb doesn’t know when to stop dating and settle down. There’s just too much fun to be had. Lesser Calebs can learn the arts of seduction from pick-up artists like Mystery or employ the plate-spinning advice from the manosphere. But once the ascent of Mount GigaChad is complete, they are equally stuck on the hedonic local maxima, the peak of most precious plenty. Tinderella is discouraged from leaving the ball too early. Don’t be dumb, she’s told. Better to stay and dance. Only as the fertility clock strikes midnight is the truth revealed. The carriage turns back into a pumpkin. And her frozen eggs turn back into what they always mostly were— missed opportunities to make some babies.
Fertility Window Dressing
My first two sons were unplanned. The next two were very planned (I donated to a friend). My next son was adopted. And the one due in July with the mother of my adopted son is something new and better, an exciting project with shared upside, more like cofounding a startup. Each of my sons has brought me increased happiness, purpose, and pride. It gets better and better, way better than my life when I was single and free to do as I pleased. Art thrives within its constraints (the memelord essay generator is a great example) and I suspect we humans do too. Stories like mine of non-traditional (and I hope inspiring) paternal happenstance and its positive ramifications are not often shared, much less frequently than paternity horror stories.
The solution to the painful problem of family non-formation starts with better left tactics, better appeals to the hearts of men and women of reproductive age. These stories can be comic like Knocked Up or tragic like the ones of women past their reproductive prime who regret wasting so much time aimlessly wandering the Eat, Pray, Love + Sex in the City + Lean In memeplex.
Babies, toddlers, and children are way cuter than puppies or kittens, but get much less play in Caleb and Kween’s media feed. That needs to change. The solution to the painful problem would contrast and compare happy thriving young and attractive families vs. lonely, boring, bitter childless folks. It would share documentary-style stories of dating, waiting, plating, and masturbating.
From the conservative/right playbook, the solution to family formation would share scientific studies and statistics, provide financial incentives, and leverage tech to make it easy for reproductive men and women to find each other for family formation.
Part of the solution to the existential pain of childlessness is to portray dating apps like smoking cigarettes, egg-freezing like buying lottery tickets, baby-making as smart as entrepreneurship, and casual sex as unhealthy as junk food.
The solution would leverage code (software, genetic, and legal) to make family formation as exciting and option-rich as using dating apps, while also providing family and community a way to participate like arranged marriages once enabled. It would incorporate financial incentives from the security models of proof-of-stake blockchains (staking and slashing) to reward users for moving from selection to procreation and to punish those who don’t. It would make it easy for families and communities to put skin in the game of their reproductive age friends and family. It would make it easy to find potential baby-making partners based on genetic compatibility and family formation preferences, including those relating to cohabitation, coparenting, number of children, and other factors that dating apps have no interest in surfacing to their users.
I am close friends with a couple who met when they were both in their late 30s, introduced by mutuals, and who decided on their first date to not waste anytime. They made a Gant Chart of conditions precedent to moving forward with their relationship, with very tight time-frames— genetic testing, sexual compatibility, meeting families, cohabitaiton, marriage, getting pregnant— all within six months. They now have three sons— ages 9 to 15. I feel confident in saying that they are both magnitudes happier with their family than they would have been childless.
Fam Jam
(from the TNS memelord essay generator).
What paid product would manifest the solution?
FAM: the best memes + the best tech = fast family formation.
A family formation platform, like a dating service, but optimized for genetic compatibility, family formation preferences, and community support, with strong innovative lefty emotional media signal and the best tech and incentives: genetic compatibility, staking/slashing crypto-style incentives, and AI-parsed multi-modal vibe check.
Provide three Anecdotes or Reference Links that illustrate the painful problem.
FAM:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/practice-may-not-make-perfect-relationship-experience-and-marital-success
https://www.notion.so/Keeper-Comments-Questions-cb46600ef3cc4427ba5a7f22694062f6
https://keeperdating.notion.site/Keeper-Investor-Pre-Seed-Memo-4b5fb350544940aca123e17dd43e1253
What are CTAs for Your Community to spread your TNS meme?
FAM: Share essay, join startup society, share with TNS memelords, contribute to FAM beta, get lifetime early access, invest in FAM.
If your Essay were a Startup Society, what's its Name, Coin Ticker (3 Letters), and One Commandment?
FAM: FAM, FAM, Family Formation First.
How can your readers share in the Upside of your TNS Essay, its Meme, and product-based solution ?
FAM: Share it and earn FAM. Redeem FAM for collab opportunities. Complete startup society tasks and earn FAM. Apply to be a FAM co-founder.
If your Essay/Meme could be associated with just one currency/payment method for commerce and crowdfunding, what would it be?
FAM: BTC with Multi-Sig Treasury controlled by FAM onchain voting.
Please provide three illustration prompts.
A nightclub setting with beautiful ladies dancing with handsome devils in the style of Picasso.
A hospital setting with a woman getting an obgyn procedure to freeze her eggs in the style of Georgia Okeefe.
A Christmas dinner setting with a happy family with four children and two sets of happy grandparents, all smiling while seated at a long table with a big turkey ready to be carved in the style of Norman Rockwell.
FAM Scraps:
I love the vision and values of the Keeper founders, but let’s not make believe that ancient connubial strictures can put the dating app djinn back in the bottle. Marriage is heavy lift for men and women— the commitment, the expense, the pomp and circumstance. Without the surrounding structure of community invested in the success of the union, marriage is castle built on sand. Divorce horror stories don’t help build momentum to matrimony.
FAM:
Between sperm donors and explosion of loners, between swiping and wifing
Sperm donation gives illusion of fatherhood potential to men.
Marriage without community is so fragile as to be obsolete for family formation.
Divorce law defaults incentivize broken families.
Marriage without children is a pointless commitment.
Family Law defaults incentivize dysfunctional coparenting.