Summary: The Network State
Absurdly detailed notes I've taken
The Network State is a very good book. Even though it sometimes reiterates the core points, it has an extremely good structure, and the language is beautifully clear. The main idea is revolutionary yet is probably a little bit disengaged from what’s going on in our mortal world but still, there’s much sense to it, even if some of it is unrealistic. One specific issue with it is that the reframing of history is quite frivolous but it’s that frivolousness that provides a solid part of the novel perspective.
Below are my bullet-point notes I’ve taken over the course of reading it. This is not nearly a complete account of the contents. If you’re interested in the points I outlined, I recommend you to go ahead and read The Network State in its full form.
Introduction
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
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, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
Different network states may focus on different metrics.
Key steps:
Found a startup society.
Organize it into a network union, a group capable of collective action.
Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online.
Networking, in-person meetups, etc.
Crowdfund physical nodes (houses, villages, towns, islands, cruise ships, etc).
Digitally connect physical communities into a network archipelago.
Conduct an on-chain census.
Gain diplomatic recognition.
A shared LARP can be powerful, if there are many people in it.
What is a new country?
Numerically, there should be many people, a lot of money and land.
Societally, a new country should be internationally recognized as a legitimate polity capable of self-determination.
Applied History for Startup Societies
Why history matters:
Win arguments.
Determine legality.
Determine morality.
Develop compelling media.
Assess the true value of a blockchain-based currency.
Find out who’s in charge.
Determine your hiring policy.
Debug a broken society.
A startup society begins by identifying a moral issue in today’s culture and presenting a historically-informed solution to that issue in the form of a new society.
If your startup society is fixing a moral deficit, you need to:
write a study of that deficit;
draw from the past and suggest a solution.
Microhistory and Macrohistory
History is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories.
Microhistory is a history of reproducible systems. See also:
Macrohistory is a history of non-reproducible systems.
But macrohistory is on a continuum with microhistory:
Science progresses by logging lots of data and by doing that with ever increasing precision.
Written records is our only reliable evidence.
Bitcoin adds robustness to macrohistory.
Backing up other blockchains as subchains by putting hashes of their data in Bitcoin network once in a specified time period.
Cryptographically verifiable macrohistory.
Political Power vs. Technological Truth
Social and political incentives favor the propagation of politically useful narratives.
Financial and technical incentives favor the propagation of technological truths.
Epistemic frameworks (or lenses) for history:
Political determinist model: the establishment dictates their truths.
Political mascot model: the establishment “champions” a group’s identity.
Technological determinist model: technology is the driving force of history.
Trajectory model: histories are trajectories.
Statistical model: history aids predictions.
Helix model: linear and cyclical history can coexist.
Ozymandias model: civilization can collapse.
Lenski model: organisms are not ordinal.
Train Crash model: those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
Idea Maze model: those who overfit to history will never invent the future.
Wright-Fisher model: history is what survives natural selection.
Computational model: history is the on-chain population; all the rest is editorialization.
Genomic model: history is what DNA (and languages, and artifacts) show us.
Tech Tree model: history is great men constrained by the adjacent possible.
God, State, and Network
The division of people as believers in one of the three is the weakest point.
Specifically, a belief is promoted that:
a) people relate to a higher power, or Leviathan (e.g. cryptocurrency folks allegedly believe in some vaguely defined network);
b) they believe that entity will “sweep the field of their enemies.”
Understandable simplification but it’s still too much. Especially with those “people didn’t steal because” remarks. People would often steal or kill and rationalize that as something good, or wanted by God, or the State, or...
The network’s cryptography and pseudonymity at least partially obstruct the government’s attempts at surveillance and violence.
The network is becoming not only more powerful but also more just.
Encryption > State Violence.
The state can still apply violence to the weakest points in a chain.
Crypto Economy > Fiat Economy.
Doubtful, given the current comparative sizes of those. (NB: at the time when I wrote this note, the banks were a bit more stable.)
Peer-to-Peer > State Media.
Social > National.
Mobile > Sessile.
Virtual Reality > Physical Proximity.
Doubtful as well. Humans ultimately need touch unless we reprogram ourselves and our DNA.
Remote > In-person.
Also doubtful, taking into account weaker synchronous communication.
International > National.
Smart Contracts > Law.
Cryptographic Verification > Official Confirmation.
Though the state is still very powerful too!
SF city government > Bay Area tech founders. (Techxit.)
CCP > Chinese tech founders. (After 2018.)
Biasing AI with AI bias. (“What, are you against ethics in AI?”)
News manipulation.
Digital deplatforming.
In some cases, they are ready to go to people’s homes.
All the remixes of those three Leviathans. Highlights:
Network + God = AI
Network + State = Nation States Going Network (both positive and negative)
People of God, People of the State, and People of the Network
American tribes and their Leviathans:
Blue:
left-authoritarians (state);
left-libertarians (network).
Red:
religious conservatives (god);
secular nationalists (state);
internationalist capitalists (network).
The realignment will be Network against State.
Authoritarians can outnumber libertarians domestically but there are more people abroad rooting for the network.
Governments aren’t households.
Firing someone should be a necessary evil, not the highest good.
Regional rearmament is akin to civil arms bearing.
The primary goal of the technological progressive, the tech founder is to build — and for no one to have power over them.
If the News is Fake, Imagine History
The historical inevitability of the US establishment’s victory over all opponents is now in question.
The US establishment has lost control over the narrative.
By listening to the establishment, your perception of reality may be off by one million fold.
Patterns of information distortion and how to keep those in check:
Channel distortion: magnifying and downranking.
Narrative alignment: what’s on the front pages; framing.
Power over truth: manufacturing consent; misinforming.
Claiming democratic legitimacy after people voted on the basis of their official misinformation.
Comparison to an aligned sensor, one that cannot win.
Network rescue: state control isn’t complete.
The Network delivers the actual freedom of speech.
The USA has never been as free as the Internet.
The “great counter-decentralization” since 2013?
Increased volume of attacks from the US on their rivals.
If you haven’t studied something in depth, your mental model of it often implicitly reduces to a few scenes from a Hollywood movie.
One of the biggest surprises of my adult life is how unethical reporters are. In movies they’re always the good guys.
— Paul Graham
Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, and Future Is Our Past
The narrative of the great USA is coming to an end.
The alternative narratives that don’t center on America are:
The fragmentation thesis.
The 1950 USA was peak centralization, everything has been increasingly decentralized since then.
The frontier thesis.
Ambitious people need space to explore and settle, and the Network gives them that. It’s also a kind of anti-communist drive.
The Fourth Turning thesis.
Change of the world order due to a potential disruption of the American system (see: Dalio, Turchin).
Based on the quasi-cyclical model of recurring conflicts (approximately every 75 years).
China as the new number one.
The future is our past thesis.
Redecentralization may be like unmixing a fluid.
The Western frontier — The Internet frontier.
The Spanish Flu — COVID-19. (Meh.)
Private banking — Cryptocurrency. (Meh.)
Left is the new Right is the new Left
Moral innovation of a startup society is most often a moral inversion: showing that something that is at large thought of as good is actually bad, or vice versa.
Politics is unavoidable as politics is about people who disagree with you.
Moral and technological progress.
Inversion examples: smoking (acceptable → bad), alcohol (bad under Prohibition → acceptable), profits (bad under Communism → acceptable).
Moral “progress” is not necessarily technologically good.
Millions dead because of poor communist decisions that were often based on their moral premises.
Deontology vs utilitarianism.
If a society’s moral principles are generally right, how could they be fundamentally changed to not make things worse?
Consent can bound the scope of moral innovation.
Moral and technological innovation depend on each other.
Political and financial arbitrage.
Moral inversions as a form of arbitrage.
This can be seen as a dispassionate mechanism for gaining political capital.
A market for revolutionaries.
Mapping the tech ecosystem to the political ecosystem.
Startup societies reunify moral and tech pro.
Left and right tribes.
Defining left and right:
1st order: permanent categories.
2nd order: relative and shifting categories.
Not everything maps to left/right conceptually.
3rd order: real axis (everything maps to left/right IRL).
4th order: relative axis because voting is more tribal than ideological, and shifts occur.
The breakdown of a victorious side into left and right factions is almost a law of societal physics.
Left/right as temporary tactics employed by either tribe.
They usually map to attacking and defending sides.
Another metaphor: ghosts possessing different hosts.
Left and right change hosts over the historical timeframes. (COVID showed that in fast-forward.)
Open frontiers mitigate factions because frontiers offer non-scarcity.
The three cycles.
The left cycle: create a new manifesto, run a revolution, compromise the revolution, capture all power.
The right cycle: strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, and hard times create strong men.
The libertarian cycle: startup → traction → success → bureaucracy.
The unified cycle: from “revolutionary, determined, ideologues” to “institutional, bureaucratic, decadence.”
Centralization, decentralization, and recentralization.
Revolutions that are frontier-opening are the crucial ones.
Left/right — word/sword — priest/warrior — software/hardware.
Their fusion is close to radical centrism.
Democrats vs Republicans is probably more tribal than ideological.
Technology is a third faction.
One Commandment
The One Commandment focuses a startup society on a single moral innovation.
Key steps:
deconstruct the establishment’s history in one specific area;
erect a replacement narrative;
prove its socioeconomic value.
Society-as-a-Service.
Parallel societies: forks that are not in opposition to the main one but are definitely different on a key axis.
Potential merges of different One Commandment societies.
How would you filter people for a Cancel-Proof Society? What if most of them become converted to wokism after joining you?
The Tripolar Moment
NYT – CCP – BTC.
Sympathy – Submission – Sovereignty.
This model will become dated and may be wrong about specifics, but we need at least some model.
Some parts are recurrent: a tripolar moment has occurred before.
The world is certainly not unipolar in 2022-2023.
Multiple centers of attraction are healthy.
Decentralization, Recentralization
Volatility is rising because the Internet increases variance.
Reflexivity happens (feedback loops, not convergence to equilibria).
Competing curves: different technopolitical phenomena.
Sociopolitical axes
International Indians. Charts are showing technological and economical growth. Millions of Indians get access to the internet. India is #3 by the number of unicorn startups (as of 2022-2023). Indians in the USA establishment.
Ecosystems develop very slowly, and then all at once.
Transhumanism vs Anarcho-Primitivism.
The Identity Stack. Almost everyone is “patriotic” about something. Explicit identity stack in one’s Twitter bio.
Technoeconomic axes
The Internet Increases Variance. Disintermediation. Extreme upsides and extreme downsides. Unbundle and rebundle.
BlueAnon, QAnon, SatoshiAnon.
Social Media is American Glasnost, Cryptocurrency is American Perestroika. Leading to a potential collapse.
The 100-Year Information Tsunami. The Internet is as a carrier of massive waves of information. Waves in a space with a different, multidimensional topology.
Naturally Physical to Natively Digital. Three phase transition: pure physical, mixed, pure digital. Dashboards, on-chain event feeds. Remote work to remote life. The digital world is primary and the physical world is just the mirror.
The Productivity Mystery. The Great Stagnation: distraction (procrastination), dissipation (too much resources spent on due processes), divergence (a few can focus), dilemma (too much rechecking), dumbness (collapse of many processes in the West), delay (until the arrival of robotics). Problems in the digital-to-analog interfaces.
Linguistic Borders of the Internet.
Network Defects. Metcalfe’s law doesn’t include the dynamic when a network loses in value over a certain threshold in its size.
Congestion-based models.
A Note on Metcalfe’s Law, Externalities and Ecosystem Splits.
Foreseeable futures
AR glasses bridge physical and digital worlds.
Experimental macroeconomics. Issue a currency, set a monetary policy, get opt-in participants, and test your theories.
Victory conditions & surprise endings
The base rate fallacy fallacy. Probably the base rate fallacy is not always true, and the USA establishment wins in the end while China collapses.
China can make a pencil. Solving the price-setting problem in a centralized way.
Fully automated luxury communism.
Duopoly of Digital Despotism. The USA and China cooperate to stop Blockchain-powered insurgents. More likely implicitly than explicitly.
Bitcoin Ends Human War, but not Robot War. China beats both the USA and Bitcoin with robots.
Recentralization. In a helical fashion.
From Nation States to Network States
Nations were brought about with mapmaking and print capitalism.
Nations with and without states, partially sovereign states, proposition nations, civilization states, post-colonial states.
Statecraft strategies are similar to programming paradigms.
Computational approach to nations.
Geographic, genetic, network, linguistic, etc distances.
The digital map: high-dimensional, plastic (huge chunks might be connected at a whim), speed, elasticity (hard to create more land, easy to stretch metaverse space), invisibility of borders.
Eventually you want to show the external world that your network union can do impressive public things as a group.
On network states
1-network, a tightly knit social network.
Admission rules, expulsion for bad behavior.
Putting in time and effort is a requirement.
Smart contracts.
Moral innovation.
Best in the form of one commandment.
Missionary societies outcompete mercenary ones.
A sense of national consciousness.
...to have done great things together, to want to do more.
A recognized founder.
Especially early on.
Often it’s necessary to make hard but important non-consensus decisions.
A capacity for collective action.
An in-person level of civility.
An integrated cryptocurrency.
An archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories.
Smart city features enabled on those territories (ENS identity signature to open doors, flags and glowing sigils in AR, etc).
A consensual government limited by a social smart contract.
Laws come after the natural formation of the group.
Not process but substance makes a government legitimate.
Polycentric law.
A virtual capital.
For instance, in an open metaverse.
An on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real estate footprint.
Attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
A network state system
Digital first.
Composition: national and governance networks.
Terra incognita and terra nullius return.
Bottom-up migration of people. Probabilistic division of people.
N networks per citizen.
Legitimacy from physical migration and digital choice.
Decentralized (and mostly automated) administration.
Domestic monopoly of root access.
International sovereignty via cryptography.
Digital diplomatic recognition. (With other network states.)
Chains manage cooperation and constraint.
Pax Bitcoinica. The dominant chain as the guarantor of exit.
Why now?
Internet : USA :: Americas : UK.
Bitcoin can constraint legacy states.
Web3 enables new chains, decentralized identities, and censorship-resistant communities.
Remote work and Starlink open up the map.
Mobile makes us more mobile.
VR builds a capital in the cloud, AR mirrors it on the land.
Telepresence changes the nature of immigration.
Social disintermediated the media.
GAFAM showed us what’s possible, startup/VC showed us how.
Land becomes elastic (e.g. artificial islands).
Bits reopen innovation in atoms.
Innovation is downstream of society organization.