The Network State - by Balaji Srinivasan
ISBN: B09VPKZR3GDate read: 2025-01-09
How strongly I recommend it: 2/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
It’s a great thought experiment: how to start a new country. Good core idea: God → State → Network. I was intrigued until it descended into long rants against America, like it was written only for Americans. I gave up after 100 more pages of that. I hope this idea is made vivid by a great movie/show.
my notes
A network state is:
* a social network with a moral innovation
* a sense of national consciousness
* a recognized founder
* a capacity for collective action
* an in-person level of civility
* an integrated cryptocurrency
* a consensual government limited by a social smart contract
* an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories
* a virtual capital
* an on-chain census
A successful network state is one that attracts aligned immigrants.
A vote of confidence by the people inside who remain and those outside who apply.
An unsuccessful network state is one that loses them.
Focus on building admirable societies that people want to join.
Religions start with history lessons.
How humans once behaved - and how they should have behaved.
There’s a moral to these stories.
Political doctrines are based on history lessons too. They’re how the establishment justifies itself.
Newspaper articles aren’t really about true-or-false, but good-and-bad.
Debug our broken society.
Running a so-called time-travel debugger to get a reproducible bug:
Once we find it, we might want to execute an undo, do a git revert, restore from backup, or return to a previously known-good configuration.
Knowing the detailed past of the system allows us to figure out what had gone wrong.
Early America’s religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose.
You’re arguing that the culture of your startup society is better than the surrounding culture.
Implicitly, that means there’s some moral deficit in the world that you’re fixing.
Without a genuine moral critique of the establishment, without an ideological root network supported by history, your new society is at best a fancy Starbucks lounge, a gated community.
History is written to the ledger. If everything that happened gets faithfully recorded, history is then just the analysis of the log files.
History is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories.
Cryptic, because the narrators are unreliable and often intentionally misleading.
Epic, because the timescales are so long that you have to consciously sample beyond your own experience and beyond any human lifetime to see patterns.
Twisting, because there are curves, cycles, collapses, and non-straightforward patterns.
Trajectories, because history is ultimately about the time evolution of human beings, which maps to the physical idea of a dynamical system, of a set of particles progressing through time.
Another term for “Big Data” should be “Big History.” All data is a record of past events.
What’s another word for data storage in a computer? Memory.
Power cares about the past because the morality of society is derived from its history.
All political ideologies have been around for all time.
The only thing that changes is whether a given ideology is now technologically feasible as an organizing system for humanity.
Our civilization may just be like the best player in a video game so far: we’ve made it the furthest, but we have no guarantee that we’re going to win before killing ourselves and wiping out like all the other civilizations before us.
Historical heuristics are strategies for distilling insight from all the documents, genes, languages, transactions, inventions, collapses, and successes of people over time.
History is the entire record of everything humanity has done.
Some truths are intrinsically relative (and hence political), whereas others are amenable to absolute verification (and hence technological).
Here’s the key:
Is it true if others believe it to be true?
Or is it true regardless of what people believe?
A political truth is true if everyone believes it to be true.
Things like money, status, and borders are in this category.
You can change these by rewriting facts in people’s brains.
For example, the question of what a dollar is worth, who the president is, and where the border of a country is are all dependent on the ideas installed in people’s heads.
If enough people change their minds, markets move, presidents change, and borders shift.
Conversely, a technical truth is true even if no human believes it to be true. Facts in math and physics exist independent of what’s in people’s brains.
Chinese have a pithy saying: the backwards will be beaten. If you’re bad at technology, you’ll be beaten.
Americans also have a saying: “you and what army?” If you’re unpopular enough, you won’t have the political power to build in the physical world.
People wanted god-fearing men in power, because a man who genuinely believed in God would behave well even if no one could punish him.
In the 1900s, why didn’t you steal? Because even if you didn’t believe in God, the State would punish you.
A new Leviathan now rose to pre-eminence.
The Network — the internet, the social network, and now the crypto network — that is the next Leviathan.
CCP’s early action in the 2000s and 2010s to ban foreign social networks looks farsighted in retrospect, as if they hadn’t built their own Weibo and WeChat, then US executives in Silicon Valley would have been able to deplatform (or surveil) anyone from China.
sometimes Network > State (which is new)
sometimes State > Network (which is what most people expect)
The competition between these Leviathans will define our time.
Choose your competitors carefully, because you’ll become a lot like them.
When you have three Leviathans (God, State, Network) that keep struggling with each other, they won’t remain pure forms.
People of God offer thoughts and prayers.
People of the State say “there oughta be a law!”
People of the Network write some code.
If the news is fake, imagine history.
New countries begin with new stories.