A society where people with technical interests, mechanism design intuition, and rationalist sensibilities represent the median rather than the tail of the distribution. Population cognitive ability is roughly +1SD from our current baseline1 — everyone has the cognitive capacity to debug Rust macros and understand VCG auctions.
Agency partnerships: Groups of 2-3 people who commit to lifelong mutual accountability and goal-tracking. Not romantic partnerships, but deep coordination bonds.
Housing: Large apartment buildings with communal basement spaces containing:
Demographics:
Micropayment infrastructure: Everything operates on sub-cent transactions through filesystem interfaces
echo "0.00002 ETH" > /mnt/services/claude/payment
cat article.txt > /mnt/nytimes/read
Mechanism design everywhere: From lunch allocation to interplanetary resource distribution, optimal mechanisms are the default approach to coordination problems.
Discount rates: ~10× lower than our world — infrastructure built to last centuries or millennia
Signaling: Through intellectual/creative output rather than material consumption. Status comes from proving theorems, composing music, or designing better coordination mechanisms.
Computing: Plan 9-style everything-is-a-file philosophy dominates. Services mounted as filesystems, coordination through namespace manipulation.
Military: Sophisticated drone warfare and defensive tech, designed by people who treat war as an optimization puzzle. Some bioweapons research (now banned by treaty) focused on enhancing diplomatic receptiveness.
Environmental: Multiple ecological disasters from over-engineering (e.g., straightening rivers). Learned through systematic failure analysis.
Material simplicity:
Cultural output:
Recreation: Social games in apartment basements, hiking trips to meet new people, mathematics as entertainment, collaborative music creation, meditation, manual crafts for tactile balance.
Initiation rituals (performed by agency-core groups together):
Libido balancing: Men take libido-reducing substances, women take libido-increasing ones to reduce gender-based coordination conflicts and even out sexual marketplace dynamics.
Commitment verification: Lie detectors used for important interpersonal commitments and agreements.
Fertility subsidies: Couples who have children receive high subsidies in an attempt to counter low fertility.
I'm not sure how niplavistani romantic relationships would look like, since the modification to their psychology through a focus on well-being & valence probably shift things. Plausibly they're poly? Not sure if marriage is a thing.
Major risks:
Defensive posture: Advanced weapons technology but preference for diplomatic solution through mechanism export ("we'll teach you optimal auctions if you don't invade us").
Relaxed approach: Taking ~2 centuries longer than theoretically optimal for transhuman transition. Philosophy: "Haste corrupts coordination, coordination enables enhancement." When baseline consciousness is already blissful and intellectually fulfilling, in addition to widespread cryopreservation, why rush?
Everything operates through optimal mechanisms rather than traditional political structures. Governance becomes an engineering problem with continuous optimization based on revealed preferences and outcome measurement. See also filepunk.
"Niplavistan optimizes for coordination and conscious experience over sensory variety. Recommended preparation: bring food supplies, emotional readiness for efficient but aesthetically minimal environment. Note: musical performances are transcendent, intellectual discourse is stimulating, but material culture may feel austere to visitors from consumption-signaling societies."
A society that solved coordination at the cost of wanderlust, embraced enhancement without losing humanity, and chose sustainable bliss over rapid transcendence.
May be an under-estimate, if they started doing embryo selection or subsidising couples with desired traits, though given that this has been in place for less than a century there's not been much effect. ↩