Do you look at the possibility of political turbulence ahead of November’s US presidential election and think: democracy could be in trouble? So does a group of tech entrepreneurs backed by big Silicon Valley money. And they love it.
Imagine if you could choose your citizenship the same way you choose your gym membership. That’s a vision of the not-too-distant future put forward by Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji – who, like Madonna, is mostly just known by his first name – is a rockstar in the world of crypto. A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do, tech can do better.
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Silicon Valley loves “disruption”. Tech startups have been disrupting traditional media for years; now they are making inroads into other areas too: education, finance, space travel. “Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience. “They exist alongside the establishment in parallel, they’re pulling away users, they’re gaining strength, until they become the new thing.”
If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned, they could replace countries too. He calls his idea the “network state”: startup nations. Here’s how it would work: communities form – on the internet initially – around a set of shared interests or values. Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.
You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice.
There is nothing new about corporations having undue influence in the affairs of nation states. The term “banana republic” derives from the fact that a US company, United Fruit, effectively ruled Guatemala for decades beginning in the 1930s. Apart from owning the majority of the land, they ran the railways, the postal service, the telegraph. When the Guatemalan government tried to push back, the CIA helped United Fruit out by instigating a coup.
But the network state movement appears to have greater ambitions still. It doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs. It wants to replace governments with companies.
It’s a long piece (his Coming Storm is worth a listen too) but keeps getting worse:
At some point during the day-long pitching session in Amsterdam, a young man in a grey hoodie slouched on stage. His name was Dryden Brown. He said he wanted to build a new city-state, somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. It would be governed not by a giant state bureaucracy, but on the blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrency. Its founding principles would be ideas of “vitality” and “heroic virtue”. He called it Praxis, the Ancient Greek word for “action”. The first citizens of this new nation, he said, would be able to move in in 2026.
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For now, though, the “Praxis community” exists mainly on the internet. There is a website where you can apply for citizenship. Who, exactly, these citizens are, is unclear. Dryden flashed up another slide with his remote. It was a Pepe meme: the sad-looking cartoon frog that became an “alt-right” mascot during the Trump campaign in 2016.
In this niche world of startup nations, Praxis had a reputation for edginess. They hosted legendary parties: people spoke of candle-lit soirees in giant Manhattan loft spaces, where awkward computer coders mixed with hipster models and figures from the “Dark Enlightenment” – people like the blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates a totalitarian future in which the world is ruled by corporate “monarchs”. His ideas are sometimes described as fascist, something he denies.
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The place was almost empty, with a few Praxis people laying out copies of their magazine around the bar. I flicked through it: expensive, heavy paper; lots of advertisements for seemingly random things: perfume; 3D-printed guns; one for just… milk. Like Pepe the Frog, milk is an internet meme. In “alt-right” circles, posting an icon of a white milk bottle signals white supremacy.
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Azi said he was excited to be “on the precipice of what I think is the next renaissance”. But before this renaissance, he predicted a “Luddite movement” against new technology that would destroy millions of jobs and monopolise the global economy. The Luddites would fail, Azi said. Yet he predicted that the transition period to what he called the “next stage” of human societal evolution – the “network state” stage – would be violent and “Darwinistic”.
Far from being perturbed by this prospect, Azi seemed excited at the thought that out of the smouldering ashes of democracy, new kings would emerge: corporate dictators ruling over their networked empires.
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At this point in the film, the screen shows an animated figure pointing a pistol straight at the viewer.
“Contemporary media proclaims that having any ideals is fascist,” the voice continues. “Everything of conviction is fascist.”
Was it an invitation to embrace the label of fascism? This movement seemed to yearn for a specific conception of Western culture - a Nietzschean world in which the fittest survive, where disruption and chaos give birth to greatness.
“Let’s try setting up our own fascist state?”
“It’s been tried and they get a bit genocidey.”
“But has it been tried with blockchain?”
“I’m listening…”
It’s gonna be so awkward when they realize they need a bureaucracy to actually make any of the things the blockchain says happen in the real world.
The biggest problem with any of this garbage ideas is procuring land for your country. No sane country/government is willing to just let you buy land and turn it into a country. You’ll buy the land, proclaim it as a new country, then after some government agency gets fed up with you for whatever reason you’re “country” is dead meat. Final step may vary on how long that takes and how it’s handled, but I seriously doubt any country would be dumb enough to let their own citizens form smaller countries within their country without resistance.
Even if it comes down to war over said territory, it would probably take a week maximum to end the dream of a new tiny country being formed inside a larger country, depending on things like country size, military size, etcetera. Only way to secure your land/country would be to pull a Sealand or build an artificial island/platform or something of the sort. Take the Sealand route and you’ll be nothing more than a joke that hardly anyone takes seriously. Build an island/platform and you run into issues depending on where you build it because for some reason countries get pretty pissy when you build artificial islands in their waters without permission or build too close to them.
Good to see some reporting that continues to gloss over Srinivasan’s obsession with culture war “woke ess” and writing that veers a little too close to the idea of purging undesirables. Also missing out on my favourite: the open musing that the next best steps might be to corrupt the police force through financial incentives so they can have them as their own private security force to take over San Francisco.
How do these network states ‘acquire’ land?
How many people are required to become a state and ‘acquire’ land?
Can others ‘acquire’ the land I’ve ‘acquired’ if I don’t want them to?
What is in the ether?
What does this solve?
These ideas are both scary and idealistically simplistic.
in the case of Honduras, a military coup installed a far right government which proceeded to loot the country in various ways, including through privatization. approving charter cities was one of these. so, they can get territory through corruption. they would probably want to keep acquiring territory in the same way they get some in the first place.
the subtext seems to be about them invading their neighbors, but it’s hard for me to imagine them getting the resources for that. it’s really, really, really expensive to outright annex territory and idk how they could do it without the support of an actual country
Yeah there is no land to “acquire” that isn’t already important to somebody, and there is no nation you can create without coming into conflict with existing nations or tribes. Terra nullius doesn’t exist!
we’ll just build an atlantic garbage patch out of ice, and
The Kingdom of Pykrete.
it’s a Roko plan, what could go wrong
Infrastructural Pykrete as a Service… if y’all can stand up the London office, I’ll handle the Bay Area fundraising, time to get paid!!!
First order of business is to thrash out the subscription model ASAP. Perhaps have tiers hilariously named after the grades of passenger on the Titanic - get steerage right down in the belly of the berg. We’ll then want a meeting about the minimum number of lifeboats we can get away with - possibly making them available in a bidding process.
I figure it’s like Lord of the Flies with rich people. Where they randomly purchase land that is sold by a legitimate country and the rich people discover that empty plots of unincorporated land don’t just contain things like police and fire departments, electricity, or roads.
I guarantee that they are even more stupid than that
Yeah there is the big problem of ‘what if your neighbors decide to make a military’, which can be easily solved by ‘create your own military first’ which then creates an interesting situation for the people around you. And before you know it the red queen is overseeing races again.
I already choose my country like I choose my broadband provider, I’m here and that’s the only option
you mean like a government?
You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider.
A famously painless, simple process…
And thanks to the free market we should note just how many options everyone has. Broadband Internet definitely isn’t a series of local monopolies with minimal ability to actually switch.
I think we’ve all walked by a giant important point.
These nearly-all-male network state fans have such compelling ideas that women outside their immediate circles would rather Xerox “bits of their bodies” than engage with those ideas. Their outreach “embassy” attracts even fewer women every day. Possibly even an average number rounding to zero.
Right now it seems like their polities will be remembered in the same religious studies lessons that teach about the Shakers.
The Shakers at least contributed some good hymns (and some sturdy furniture) to posterity. if these guys ever get off the ground they’ll produce nothing but empty cans of energy drink and racist AI memes
You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice.
Ahh, I can’t wait.
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wait, what’s blockchain tree forts
The derogatory nickname I came up with for this latest techbro circle jerk. Probably not entirely accurate but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
no it’s correct for what Balaji is postulating
Ahh, now it registered, lol
I’m about to make a pile of buttcoins from selling “no girls allowed” signs
Isn’t this just Snow Crash again? Can’t these techbros read another book, we already have the Meta verse and it wasn’t that popular in reality.
A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do, tech can do better.
This is just really fucking rich.
I mean, the tech industry can’t be beat at getting people like Balaji Srinivasan an obscene amount of money, so they must be doing something right!
Ballbag Srinivasan still at his old tricks.
Good to see Reddit Island getting a revisit. I look forward to the Netflix disaster documentary.
