The Network State is a theory by Balaji Shrinvasan about a semi virtual, cloud connected society of ideologically aligned individuals with its own currency, laws, systems, services, governance and GDP to eventually gain the power and influence of existing nation states.
This is from Shrinvasan's 1 sentence description of a Nation State:
In one informal sentence:
When we think of a nation state, we immediately think of the lands, but when we think of a network state, we should instantly think of the minds. That is, if the nation state system starts with the map of the globe and assigns each patch of land to a single state, the network state system starts with the 7+ billion humans of the world and attracts each mind to one or more networks.
Here’s a more complex definition that extends that concept and pre-emptively covers many edge cases:
OK, that’s a mouthful! It’s lengthy because there are many internet phenomena that share some but not all of the properties of a network state. For example, neither Bitcoin nor Facebook nor a DAO is a network state, because each lacks certain qualities – like diplomatic recognition – which are core to anything we’d think of as the next version of the nation state.
(If you want to skip ahead, we expand on each part of the definition in Chapter 5. But it’ll make more sense if you read the text all the way through. For what it’s worth, the technical definition of a nation state is similarly multi-clausal, because it needs to exclude things we don’t typically think about, like stateless nations.)
So my question is, who would join a Nation State, what country are you from, why, what would you contribute and what would it look like?
Who would like to be a settler in The Network State and what country are you from. And as a bonus why, and what do think it looks like?
byu/latinsurfer3525 inFuturology
6 Comments
This is the oligarch pet project to replace self-governance with their own power. Fuck him. Fuck them.
Silicon valley “inventing” things that already exist. In this case, they invented a political party and/or an interest group. Yay.
I suspect that any social structure not tied to a specific territory is doomed to fail. Our brains haven’t evolved to operate in a completely distributed, virtual network state, we naturally need neighbors and physical proximity to thrive and feel connected. Our tribal instincts are pretty deep rooted and medieval, a purely virtual network state might struggle to compete with traditional nation states, which are rooted in physical communities. Nation states have a better chance of achieving a social system that blends the stability of territorial boundaries with the benefits of cloud-based technologies, rather than relying primarily on a distributed network model to provide national identity.
Fuck these techno-feudalist oligarchs straight to hell. May they bounce up and down on razor sharp demon cock for a trillion years. Traitors.
I really thought there would be more insightful reflective replies to this post. There’s a lot of anger, and perhaps even denial, but I don’t know if that can be helpful in adapting effectively to a world that may include Network States.
If techbros could figure out how to breathe through their own butts, it’d be the first time they implemented an original idea. What they really need to disrupt is their aversion to deodorant.
These people present no evidence of ability to govern their own lives, and thus are not remotely qualified to launch a social revolution. If the blockchain imbroglio has taught us anything, it’s that too many confuse complexity for canniness.