We need network societies, not network states (2024)
63 comments
·February 5, 20250xbadcafebee
> His book, The Network State (TNS), puts forth a new social contract enabled by “Web3 technology,” centered on blockchains
I love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more
oneplane
Another fun thing from that book is a fantasy on how things will be better because you can't revert things. It's essentially digital feudalism combined with populism. How could that possibly go wrong...
stephen_g
I couldn't believe it a few years ago when people were talking about NFTs as the 'future' of keeping track of property ownership for everything. Like, somebody stole a cryptographic key, now they can 'prove' they now own my house and I can't (code is law, right?). Or a relative died and now their crypto-currency keys are permanently inaccessible - now all their money is lost forever and nobody can inherit it, even with court order etc.!
That's just not the world most people want to live in...
zoklet-enjoyer
Code is not law. Law is law. Very few people argue that code is law and it has become an anti-blockchain talking point.
Multi signature wallets exist.
mullingitover
xkcd summed up why these ideas are dumb in two panels[1] a really long time ago. Just replace 'encrypted laptop' with 'the private key that controls your whole life.'
kridsdale3
This is one of those ones I have the index essentially mapped to the image in my brain already, no need to click.
ta1243
> a really long time ago.
2009.
Why do I think that Spiderman has just schooled me on my age.
AlchemistCamp
And yet, the brute with the $5 wrench still hasn't gotten Satoshi's bitcoins.
There's a lot to be said for pseudonyminity.
CamperBob2
I love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more
I wish this were a laughing matter, but it's not. These people appear to be quite serious and quite capable. There's a coalition in play that includes the Project 2025 authors among others, operating at a scope that a lot of people don't fully appreciate. If this coalition holds together, they may be able to execute what many would consider a rather frightening agenda.
Despite its cheesy title, this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no ) offers an interesting perspective on Balaji Srinivasan and his place in a larger web of influence alongside people like Yarvin, Musk, and Vance. It's eye-opening. She released it back in November and promptly took a lot of flack from people calling her alarmist and conspiracy-prone, and now it's basically playing out in real time.
samplatt
That video crossed my path 2 days ago. As much as it';s terrifying, I can't help but be impressed by how fucking close William Gibson and Mike Pondsmith came in writing their background-lore for their respective cyberpunk universes.
The Corpos seizing power from a failing democracy, instigating war, and then declaring their own territories and power structures. From which the country, the world, never recovers.
aldous
[dead]
RajT88
You could as easily have led with:
Hey stupid, who is going to work in your factories?
And follow the premise from there.
frontalier
i would hope we don't dismiss this the same way we dismissed project 2025 then end up surprised it was the plan all along
aqueueaqueue
I didn't read more. Because whether it was a critique of said web3 thing or praising it. I can't be bothered!
tomrod
It is a critique, and timely one at that. Worth a read.
floydnoel
the classic HN value of proud incuriosity! you love to see it
dustingetz
the book is quite interesting, one idea was - how many hours do we spend online per day? i spend, like, 15 hours plugged in - PC, iphone, TV/games. i’m plugged in when i’m driving, when i’m out jogging, i’m plugged in right now as i wake up drinking coffee in bed, I have more internet friends than IRL and they are more important, my business/financial relationships are entirely digital, as is most of my relationship with the state. So, why are governments organized by geography? How long until we free ourselves entirely from this constraint?
teitoklien
We can’t , physical violence is still localized and geography based. A States core authority and existence is formed by having a monopoly on violence across a region, not services provided.
dustingetz
can't what? civilization is organized hierarchically, alliance union country state county city township neighborhood street family individual. Layers get added on top as civilization progresses in order to make trade more efficient. A concrete issue today is getting startup stock options to cross international lines in a remote-first world. There is sufficient demand for a solution that solutions will emerge on a timescale of, idk decades for sure. There were not global alliances 400 years ago and 400 years from now there will probably be interstellar. Fudge N to match your best guess as to rate of progress.
tomrod
> So, why are governments organized by geography?
Defense from strongman-style authoritarians and bandits
> How long until we free ourselves entirely from this constraint?
When we overcome the gravity well with several orders of magnitude less energy than required. Then the constraint is still geography, but allows people to spread out.
cmehdy
Your wireless connection makes you believe that you're more globalized than you actually are.
Your internet pipes are starting right behind the modem. So is your electricity. The energy mix powering your life depends on the geopolitics of your area, as it might be nuclear/solar/hydro/gas/fuel powered and therefore dependent on your country's stance towards nuclear power plants, renewables, your country's geography, and natural resources. Your power bill at the end of the month also largely depends on that stuff, amongst most other things. Consequently so does your net income and ability to enjoy all that tech.
The content served to you is generally on CDNs nearest to you. A vast majority of the content you produce and consume is extremely related to relatively localized influences, such as your English keyboard, the average search engine results that are biased towards your location, any of the myriad of system settings that accommodate for your local culture, etc. Side-note: as a French (France) citizen in Quebec (Canada) it's been absolute hell trying to actually access the internet I knew back home, because search engines flat out don't show me what I used to get in fr_fr since fr_ca dominates here. (Kagi offsets that a bit thanks to locale being selectable, although there's a dearth of results at times somehow, perhaps driven by differences between what's preferred on the pipes in North America vs Europe).
When and how you access these technologies depends nearly entirely on your local area, as you're generally unlikely to be jogging at 2:30am your time, unlikely to play your games mid-day on a weekday as defined by your country and culture, etc.
And when a storm hits your area, the whole world won't care but your neighbor will have to protect himself and his belongings just as much as you will.
While we are indeed more connected than ever before, the primary things we've connected are our anxieties and rich people's consolidated power. The rest remains profoundly local.
dustingetz
book covers that. No civilization in history wants a hyper-libertarian world without firefighters, that's for sure
ljm
Maybe I'm a simple person, but what you and other people who subscribe to this idea think seems to just be another brand of libertarianism. And libertarianism (by the US definition) is basically just edge-lord politics: if something isn't personally important to me then why does a government need to provide it?
In this world free of geography, who exactly is responsible for keep all of the geographically constrained plumbing in operation while you recline at your desk and enjoy the digital porcelain? And would a board of corporate overlords owning your patch of land really serve you better than a council of local representatives?
dustingetz
who said i subscribe to what now?
hooverd
take these people entirely seriously right now
tomrod
Indeed. As improbable as their end state is, forewarned is forearmed.
floydnoel
sorry, GP is too busy posting shallow dismissals of things he didn't read! (and violating the HN rules along the way)
null
__MatrixMan__
I agree with this critique, but I think it fails to get at the heart of the Web3 problem, which is that blockchains use a protocol to enforce consensus, but politically speaking, a forced consensus is no consensus at all.
We do desperately need a big rethink of our incentives, by all means invite the game theorists--lets get nerdy about it--but if we then enshrine the results of that analysis into a protocol that makes it so (thus creating a network state) it's doomed to fail due to a lack of legitimacy. Whatever we build has to let people disagree, but amplify the cases where they agree so that we can find what's actionable, not what's engaging. Web 2 and 3 have failed so far to get that right. C'mon 4 we're rooting for you.
XorNot
I would hardly even go that far: blockchains can only enforce parameters of the blockchain. The physical world is under no obligation to respect that.
That's always been the core issue.
__MatrixMan__
If we wanted to, we could "fix" that. We let fictions like money rule the real world as it is, and we could easily take it further by replacing all of our locks with ones that only open for you if the chain says they should and other such ill advised automations.
But lets not, because partition tolerance, not consistency, has the superior political implications. Blockchains are just on the wrong side of the CAP theorem. It's a place for authoritarians and willful ignorance of important truths.
XorNot
That's just building a new, worse legal system though, the blockchain ensures nothing. It has no additional force or protections then the current one.
ang_cire
Speaking as a Bay Area Startup alum tech bro...
Don't let tech bros build governments.
These guys clearly read Snowcrash and thought, "man, these corporate city-state enclaves with robot dogs sound like a great idea!"
But don't take my word for why it's bad, there's currently one tech bro proving me right in real time!
egberts1
We need a lot lower latency than UK's 15-minute Smart City model.
nickdothutton
> We don’t need to choose between reaction and stasis. This person has never met anyone in government or the civil service. I don't really like to dunk on someone trying to be positive, but we have had every liberal reform and here we are.
ChrisArchitect
(2024)
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42230966
robocat
Sounds like it is trying to be a non-fiction version of Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand's SciFi distopian libertarian vision).
throw0101a
On network states, see perhaps "The bro-ligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term":
> All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
> The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.
[…]
> The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”
* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration...
SpicyLemonZest
This article doesn't claim to have any deep insight into what a network state is or what advocates of a network state want. Its only reference to the concept is a quote from another journalist, who offers a confusing definition that "network state" means "tech authoritarianism" which in turn means "to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land".
abc123abc123
Buzzword bingo with pinches of weasel words. Nothing to see here. Next!
TZubiri
Yeah dude like totally we don't need countries dude we can just live off the cyberland
null
The main flaw of The Network State is the concept of reverse diaspora.
The idea that multiple people with no shared background will magically come together and collaborate to the extent that they can form an scalable movement that results in a meatspace state that is one cohesive collaborative unit.
Whenever a group of people pool their effort and resources together, another group of opportunistic people will try to take advantage.
The Network State is inspired by cryptocurrencies, which are often affected by predatory speculative behavior. Pyramid schemes, pump and dump schemes, rug pulls, etc.
The more resources and effort are pooled together, and the more power is accrued, the higher the incentive for competitors to arise, both internal and external.
And this flaw is the aspect shared with most utopian theories that expect everyone to collaborate do not account for simple game theory. Give enough incentives and the doves turn into hawks.
Another flaw is that by having a highly sparse geographical distribution, the political representation of their members and the likelihood they will gain enough influence to take over tends to zero unless each member can attain local leadership and influence.
At most, that can get that to scale to city-states, but city-states are almost always vassal states.