{"author":{"username":"balajis","displayName":"balajis","fid":37},"timestamp":"2026-10-21T17:27:14.000Z","text":"$2048 IN PRIZES FOR VIDEOS ON NORBERT ELIAS & CIVILITY\n\nAs noted above, within the Farcaster reference client, we want friend speech rather than foe speech. But really the term we’re looking for is civility.\n\nTHE SHORT WAY\nThe short way for me to explain to a crypto degen why civility is important is to make the narrowly economic case: Singapore is much more valuable than either the Soviet Union or Somalia, because its people are polite, courteous, and respectful towards each other, which means they can cooperate at larger scale, which means they can build more valuable things. So: it’s in your interest to stop being a crypto “degenerate”, even in a joking way, and instead become a regenerate. Help us regenerate civilization, starting here at Farcaster — because we can build far more valuable things together (including physical things!) if we can re-establish the base of civility that underpins a high-trust society.\n\nTHE LONG WAY\nThe long way for me to explain why civility is important is to (a) refer you to a series of good books and then (b) ask you to make 59 second vertical videos out of those books, summarizing as much of the gist as possible.\n\nStart with Norbert Elias’ book, The Civilizing Process. The rough background is that Europe was civilized (during Rome), then it became de-civilized (during the Dark Ages), then it gradually re-civilized (starting well before the Renaissance).\n\nHow did that re-civilization happen? Elias shows through the study of centuries of Middle Ages etiquette that Europe rose out of its post-Roman collapse in part by adopting good interpersonal manners. In modern terms, manners were a peer-to-peer signaling mechanism between strangers showing that the other person’s animal impulses were firmly under control.\n\nOnce Europeans could trust each other on extremely small things, like whether they were going to spit at the table, they could potentially trust each other on larger things…and thus did scaled cooperation return after the end of Rome. In tandem with this (literally) peer-to-peer civilizing process, Europeans started to gradually recentralize. Instead of the thousands of competing warlords that arose after the end of Rome, a few royal houses gradually consolidated a monopoly on physical violence, such that every interpersonal slight didn’t immediately result in a potentially murderous brawl.\n\nYou can try ordering the paperback by Elias (amazon.com/dp/0631221611) or read a decent review (researchgate.net/publication/248991628_The_Civilising_process_A_review_of_Norbert_Elias), but because a Kindle copy isn’t available in English right now, you can also get pretty far by querying an AI model that has indexed the full text. Start with a query like this: “Tell me about Norbert Elias’ book, which shows how modern state capacity and complex markets arose as Europeans re-learned self-restraint and manners. The counterintuitive point by Elias is that civilization is dependent on seemingly trivial peer-to-peer behavior, like table manners, and not just laws or capital.”\n\nThe reason I reference this book is that today’s social media is much like the Medieval Europe Elias studied. It's a place where anyone can attack anyone at any time, with essentially no central authority to stop disputes from spiraling out of control. A big part of what got Europe from the dark ages to the nation state era was the concept of civility; that's also what we think will be crucial for moving from today's internally combative social networks to network states.\n\nYOUR TASK\n\nMake a ~59 second vertical video with a 9:16 aspect ratio on the evolution of civility, and how it enabled large-scale interpersonal cooperation, starting with Norbert Elias’ work. Assume your viewer has absolutely no context and is starting cold. Talk to them in concrete terms anyone can understand, in terms of why a group that’s mutually polite to each other can be more successful economically (in terms of creating wealth) and physically (in terms of increasing safety) because they can cooperate at larger scale.\n\nWe’ll give $1,024 for first place, $512 for second place, and then $128 each for honorable mentions, subject to whether there are enough good submissions. Winners will be paid in USDC to their public Farcaster wallet addresses by default. To enter, reply to this post with your vertical video. This prize will run for three days exactly from this post’s timestamp.\n\nThat's it. Our journey of one thousand miles starts with a single step. Go read a book, or at least ask an AI about it if you can't get a copy. Then make that vertical video on why civility is economically necessary, and help restore friend speech on Farcaster!","images":["https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/48354abe-13a1-4dab-6d69-13d00b7a9400/original"],"links":[{"url":"https://amazon.com/dp/0631221611"},{"url":"https://researchgate.net/publication/248991628_The_Civilising_process_A_review_of_Norbert_Elias"}],"farcaster":"https://farcaster.xyz/balajis/0x376e04509f3f9eab6a2b506519bf303349ac87a7","firefly":"https://firefly.social/post/farcaster/0x376e04509f3f9eab6a2b506519bf303349ac87a7"}