The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan

As we enter the sundowning era of the USA, and as the world order shifts before our eyes, it's time to think about new power structures and new ways to organize people.

Think of this book as The Sovereign Individual for groups. While The Sovereign Individual gives readers a framework for individual power and adaptability, The Network State offers a framework for group power and adaptability; it gives readers conceptual maps and tools for understanding and navigating the (hopefully peaceful) struggle coming as legacy nation states decline in power and new structures fill the resulting vacuum.

This book offers an excellent assessment and explanatory framework for all the weird, seemingly irrational sh*t going on in the United States (and other declining countries) over the past decades--and especially the past few years. Viewed through the author's various lenses, things make a fair bit more sense. The Network State also sends you down a lot of really good rabbit holes: I found several worthwhile podcasts, interesting monographs, I discovered 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt, etc. You'll also walk away from this work with a long reading list; this alone makes the book worthwhile. All that said, it's not a perfect book: it's repetitive in places, padded out with tangents in others.

Finally, from a creative standpoint: it's interesting to see how Balaji essentially wrote the bones of this book on Twitter. The author links to past tweet threads throughout the text, thus you can see how he arranged and organized his thoughts, how he engaged with critiques, and how he gradually shaped the fundamental insights of this book on that platform. It's like watching an author working out a book on note cards, except that those note cards are hung out in the public domain--and discussed, criticized and chewed over by random people. Good stuff.

Pair with:

The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg

The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous

Any interview or podcast you can find on Youtube with "Gigi" 

Notes: 

p 8: "Chapter 1 is an overview of the ideas. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 present an analysis that leads to a concerning forecast for the near future, the problem of American Anarchy and Chinese Control. And Chapter 5 presents our proposed solution for maintaining liberal values in an illiberal world: startup societies and network states."

Chapter 1: Quickstart

p 9: The Network State in one sentence: 

"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."

p 9: Land vs minds: "...the network state system starts with the 7+ billion humans of the world and attracts each mind to one or more networks."

p 9: A more complex definition: 

"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."

p 10: "Continued growth is a continuous plebiscite, a vote of confidence by the people inside who remain and those outside who apply. Roughly speaking, a successful network state is one that attracts aligned immigrants, and an unsuccessful network state is one that loses them."

p 10: "...admirable societies that people want to join." A state premised on extending life expectancy of its citizens, or other examples of foundational reasons.

p 11-12: On the pathway and development of a network state: "cloud first, land last": startup-->network union (useful in its own right, crowdsourcing, bulk buying, etc)-->trust offline and cryptoeconomy online-->crowdfund physical nodes-->linking those nodes into a network archipelago-->on-chain census-->diplomatic recognition 

p 12: "Unlike an ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which packs millions of disputants in one place, a network state is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized."

p 12: "First build the collective muscle to do real things, then manage real money and real estate, and finally become recognized as a real state."

p 13: Peaceful transition by building something new, not replacing something legacy, which usually involves fighting over scarce resources. 

p 15: "What we’ve described thus far is much like an ethnic diaspora, in which emigrants are internationally dispersed but connected by communication channels with each other and the motherland. The twist is that our version is a reverse diaspora: a community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online, and only then comes together in-person to build dwellings and structures."

p 15: "Let’s pause and summarize for a second." [what a great fourth wall phrase to use!]

p 16: see for example Bitcoin, which reached "numerical success" ($1b valuation), then societal recognition (listed on CNBC/Bloomberg).

p 17: Most countries are small, 1-10m people; a networked people would be comparable to most existing states. 

Chapter 2: History as Trajectory

p 20: on mining history to "win" political contests (see grievance studies, mining history for offenses and "useful" incidents, weaponizing history); history determines legality, the establishment claims legitimacy from history, winners write the history books, etc. 

p 20: "We denote the exponential improvement in transistor density over the postwar period by Moore’s law. We describe the exponential decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency during the same period as Eroom’s law--as Moore’s law in reverse."

p 21: "Only when you understand the legitimating history of regulatory agencies better than their proponents do can you build a superior alternative: a new regulatory paradigm capable of addressing both the abuses of the American reg-ulatory state and the abuses they claim to prevent."

p 22-3: The author gives a great example of how knowing the (objectively disgusting) history of the publishers of the NY Times lets you escape the matrix of their moralizing on all topics. You "win" by knowing its true history. (see The Grey Lady Winked)

p 24: On the repeal of the Volstead Act (which ended Prohibition) as a "git_revert" (a rewind to a recent prior version and restart). 

p 26: "While a political consumer has to pick one of a few party platforms off the menu, a political founder can do something different: ideology construction. To inform this, we’ll show how left and right have swapped sides through history, and how any successful mass movement has both a revolutionary left component and a ruling right component."

p 27-28: a "One Commandment" for a startup society. Examples could be "Keto/Carbs Bad" or "Christianity"; "it focuses a startup society on a single moral innovation"... "That is, as we’ll see, each One Commandment-based startup society is premised on deconstructing the establishment’s history in one specific area, erecting a replacement narrative in its place with a new One Commandment, then proving the socioeconomic value of that One Commandment by using it to attract subscriber-citizens.... 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 that differs only in its amenities, a snack to be eaten by the establishment at its leisure, a soulless nullity with no direction save consumerism."

p 29: Toward a new concept of cryptohistory, "history written to the ledger" "If everything that happened gets faithfully recorded, history is then just the analysis of the log files." Thus it will be more difficult to mine or manipulate for the current power structure's purpose. 

p 30: "...the subjects of the study don’t want to be studied." People, nations, etc., will hide history from you, thus information/history is intentionally corrupted.

p 31ff: Microhistory (reproducible, small, measurable/limited variables, can be reset/replayed; a simple experiment or the flight of a spaceship through space) vs Macrohistory (non-reproducible, large, tons of variables, adversarial actors reacting, can't be replayed; a turbulent fluid or history of humanity)

p 32: positing a continuum between microhistory and macrohistory; big data is big history

p 33: the problems of silos (different corporate data servers like Google, Twitter, etc), bots (lots of online content which isn't verified could be bots), censors (data deleted or suppressed) and fakes (due to advent of AI you can get highly realistic fakes). "So, how could someone in the future (or even the present) know if a particular event they didn’t directly observe was real? The Bitcoin blockchain gives one answer. It is the most rigorous form of history yet known to man, a history that is technically and economically resistant to revision. Thanks to a combination of cryptographic primitives and financial incentives, it is very challenging to falsify the who, what, and when of transactions written to the Bitcoin blockchain."

p 34: "...we will likely think of the beginning of cryptographically verifiable history as on par with the beginning of written history millennia ago." [Note also that the BTC blockchain (or any blockchain) can record non-BTC (or other chain) events.]

p 37: "...ever more of the digital history of our economy and society will be recorded on chain, in a cryptographically verifiable yet privacy-preserving way. The analogy is to the increase in bandwidth, which now allows us to download a megabyte of JavaScript on a mobile phone to run a webapp, an unthinkable indulgence in the year 2000."

p 37: Public blockchains aren't siloed, they are censor-resistant and fake-resistant, etc. 

p 38: "...essentially all of human behavior has a digital component now. Every purchase and communication, every ride in an Uber, every swipe of a keycard, and every step with a Fitbit--all of that produces digital artifacts. So, in theory you could eventually download the public blockchain of a network state to replay the entire cryptographically verified history of a community... Not a scattered letter from an Abelard here and a stone tablet from an Egyptian there. But a full log, a cryptohistory... This concept is foundational to the network state."

p 38: Note that this can be used for good (decentralized) or for ill (centralized, like Chinese- or NSA-style surveillance state, or a CBDC). See how political power can defeat technological truth; history is written by the winners, history is what is useful to the regime, see also the "political mascot" model where "history is written by winners pretending to be acting on behalf of losers... The technique is to pick a mascot that the state claims to champion, such as the Soviet Union’s proletariat, and then go through history to find the worst examples of the state’s current rival doing something bad to them." 

p 38ff: various examples of winners writing the history books and history is whatever's useful to the regime given in the following pages, plenty of hypocrisy to go around here.

p 40: "...once you get your head out of the civilization you grew up in, and look at things comparatively, the techniques of political history become obvious."

p 40-41: See also the "atrocity story": the general concept is “something so bad happened, we must use (state) force to prevent it from happening again.”

p 42n: Lysenkoism as a mind virus that kills its host too quickly: you harm both ruler and ruled if you deny truth to the point where you kill ruler and ruled. 

p 42ff: various models for history: technological determinist model; trajectory model, helix model (cyclical with trajectory, both), Lenski model (not ordinal), Ozymandias model (toward collapse), the idea maze model (if you overfit to history you'll never invent the future: something that didn't work in the past may work great today, see BTC for example), much of this section seems unnecessary to the book, but it's still interesting to read.

p 46ff: "...there are as many different models for understanding history"... or "analysis of the log files" "Here, we mean 'log files' in the most general sense of everything society has written down or left behind; the documents, yes, but also the physical artifacts and genes and artwork, just like a log 'file' can contain binary objects and not just plain text." "History is the entire record of everything humanity has done. It’s a very rich data structure that we have only begun to even think of as a data structure." 

p 46: "...if you’ve ever found a reporter’s summary of an eyewitness video to be wanting, or found a single video misleading relative to multiple camera angles, you’ll realize why having access to the full log of public events is a huge step forward."

p 47: Three examples where "technological truth" overcame "political power"

p 48: defining political truth as what people believe to be true (money, status, borders); defining a technical truth as true even if no human believes it to be true (math, physics). Political truths can be changed "by rewriting the software in peoples' brains" and "some things really do depend on an arbitrary consensus, you realize that we need to maintain a balance between political power and technological truth."

p 48: The pithy Chinese saying "the backwards will be beaten."

p 49: "Putting all the pieces together:

• We have a political theory of history that says “social and political incentives
favor the propagation of politically useful narratives.”
• We have a technological theory of history that says “financial and technical in-
centives favor the propagation of technological truths.”
• We have a set of examples that show how politically powerful actors were con-
strained by decentralizing technology.
• We have more examples that show that some facts really are determined by
societal consensus, while others are amenable to decentralized verification.
• And we understand why groups need both to survive; the backwards will be
beaten, while the unpopular will never have political power in the first place.
Can we generalize these observations into a broader thesis, into an overarching theory that includes the clash of political power and technological truth as a special case? We can. And that leads us to a discussion of God, State, and Network."

p 49: "a collision of Leviathans"; "Every doctrine has its Leviathan, that prime mover who hovers above all. For a religion, it is God. For a political movement, it is the State. And for a cryptocurrency, it is the Network. These three Leviathans hover over fallible men to make them behave in pro-social ways."

p 50: "...it is not just God that is dead. It is the State that is dying. Because here in the early innings of the 21st century, faith in the State is plummeting."

p 50: "So: in the 1800s you wouldn’t steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you didn’t steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you can’t steal because the Network won’t let you."

p 51: "Put another way, what’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption. Because as Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation... Encryption thus limits governments in a way no legislation can."

p 52-53: Network > State 

Encryption > State Violence

Cryptoeconomy > Fiat Economy (BTC is "money the State can't easily freeze, seize, ban, or print.")

Peer-to-Peer > State Media

Social > National 

Mobile > Sessile (fixed; immobile, like a barnacle) ("...law is a function of latitude and longitude; as you change your location, you change the local, state, and federal laws that apply to you. As such, migration is as powerful a way to change the law under which you live as election.")

Virtual Reality > Physical Proximity 

Remote > In-person ("The Network allows you to work and communicate from anywhere. Combined with mobile, this further increases leverage against the State.")

International > National

Smart Contracts > Law

Cryptographic Verification > Official Confirmation

p 54: Interesting example given here of Trump's deplatforming as an example of a network (the US Establishment) triumphing over a state (the US Gov't); "...the 'most powerful man in the world' was clearly no longer even the most powerful man in his own country."

p 54n: Great point here: "There’s a strong argument that the power of the presidency has been steadily declining since FDR, who can be thought of as a four-term dictator who consolidated power, prosecuted his enemies, and ruled till he died... Indeed, the US today has something similar to a “constitutional monarchy,” namely a 'bureaucratic presidency' wherein the president is in key respects an increasingly vestigial figure."

p 55-57: Counter-examples: 

SF govt > Bay Area tech founders; 

CCP > Chinese tech founders (Jack Ma, et al) (also note here that China might have been extremely forward thinking in banning US-based social media apps and building their own: it closed off an obvious avenue for the US to surveil Chinese citizens!) Also: Biasing AI with AI bias (putting an ideological thumb on the scale of AI, "making sure that their code is 100% regime compliant.") Digital Deplatforming ("the muzzling of regime-disfavored voices on social media" as another example of State > Network)

p 58: on the State co-opting the Network; Hegelian dialectic (thesis->antithesis->synthesis, or the tech founder's version of Hegelian dialectic from Larry Ellison: “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. You’ll see people remix them together to create new kinds of social orders, new hybrids, new syntheses in the Hegelian sense." See for example how the State co-opts God (Communism); Jewish diaspora as God/Network.

p 59-60: Synthesis of Network and State, the fusion we're most interested in: 

* The from scratch version from Chapter 1: "where an internet leader builds a large enough network union online that it can crowdfund territory and eventually attain diplomatic recognition."

* Other positive syntheses: BTC, Web3

* Note also, cities and countries are starting to look more and more digital/networked: 

"a) their citizens are often geographically remote, (b) the concept of citizenship itself is becoming similar to digital single sign-on, (c) many 20th century functions of government have already been de-facto transferred to private networks like (electronic) mail delivery, hotel, and taxi regulation, (d) cities and countries increasingly recruit citizens online, (e) so-called smart cities are increasingly administrated through a computer interface, and (f) as countries issue central bank digital currencies and cities likely follow suit, every polity will be publicly traded on the internet just like companies and coins." See also El Salvador and BTC, Wyoming and their BTC banking and DAO law, etc. 

p 60: negative syntheses: USG, CCP, hostile takeovers of centralized tech companies by centralized states, etc.

p 62-63: "Now let’s talk about the recent history of power struggles, between people of God, people of the State, and people of the Network... As we’ll see, the introduction of the Network Leviathan clarifies some conflicts and splits some factions."

p 63: re left-authoritarians, left-libertarians: "Each member of blue tribe will have to make a choice in the years to come...Is their definition of 'democracy' commensurate with a world where the 4% (namely the Americans) rule the 96% (namely the non-Americans), inflating away the globe’s savings, destroying local cultures, and surveilling the world at all times? Or do they believe the rest of the world deserves digital self-determination?"

p 64: On doctrine as umbrella term: "God-worshippers have religions (religious doctrines), State-loyalists have political parties (with political doctrines), and Network-centrists have social networks or cryptocurrencies (with tightly enforced content moderation or crypto tribalism respectively, which are network doctrines)."; Wokeness as doctrine, etc.  

p 65-66: Left-auths worship the State, "pray for relief" from the State, taxes are tithes, supporting the current thing, "Later we will call it NYT/USD, to emphasize their source of truth and digital economy relative to BTC/web3 and CCP/RMB." "It’s important to understand that the power of the left-authoritarians comes from getting the officials of the centralized American State and (more recently) the executives of the centralized Big Tech Network to crush their enemies." (by getting people fired, passing laws, etc.)

p 66: Great quote here: "The [Watergate] episode has been endlessly romanticized, but here’s a different perspective on it: the corporate takeover of America we’re supposed to be constantly vigilant for actually already occurred 50 years ago, just from the left, when a few privately-owned media corporations cooperated to get Nixon fired and the Pentagon Papers leaked, proving that the control circuitry outside the State was upstream of the mere elected government and US military."

p 68: "...the left-authoritarian wants to get you fired, or get your boss to fire you, but won’t even mention their boss. They are fundamentally just dogs on a leash..."

P 68ff: Left-Libertarians ("They really don’t identify with the US establishment that much, even if they sometimes wish it would execute the redistribution strategy of their dreams") who are finding more leverage with The Network than with The (legacy) State, pushing them away from the US Establishment (it's easier to organize a twitter mob than a real mob). They reject the overt state-worship of the auth-left; the author is arguing that there will be a split down the middle of the left party in the USA, into "Blue State" and "Blue Network." This is "the emerging Network-vs-State division within blue tribe."

p 70: Red/Right division into "Secular Nationalists" and "Internationalist Capitalists": Do conservatives "believe in the founding principles encoded in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, or will they simply enforce whatever edicts emanate from an increasingly malign US establishment--supporting statists in practice?"

p 71: "...the red statist is a secular nationalist: they don’t have a God, but they do believe in the State, the good vision of America as a shining city on a hill... Top Gun America." "In this they have the opposite set of blind spots from the blue left-libertarian, who can clearly see the ruin of countries unfortunate enough to experience a 21st century US 'intervention,' yet imagines the same government that’s a chaotic destroyer abroad can become a benevolent redistributor at home."

p 73: "By 2022, the question of whether America produces chaos with its military interventions can hardly be gainsaid--even the most committed American nationalist is hard pressed to name a country that’s better off after a recent US military intervention..."

p 74: Red Network: Internationalist Capitalists: tech for now, but crypto-capitalism in the future. Also BTC as "a symbol of international freedom and prosperity that is more powerful than any State."

p 75: The realignment, where "we get a possible future where the left- and right-libertarians from both parties line up against the left- and right authoritarians... That Realignment would be the Network against the State." [Is this at all plausible? It seems there's so much religious-like orthodoxy in hating "the other side" among these groups that the authoritarians could never unite. But maybe I'm wrong] "...the Reagan era was right-vs-left, whereas the Network-vs-State era would be top vs bottom."

p 77-78: on the difference between tech/Network people's and State people's mentality: the Network people want to get a piece of the network, create a site, code, etc., all as mechanisms to have/exert power; the State people want to get a piece of the State, passing laws, regulating, getting a job as undersecretary of whatever, to have power too, but with coercion as the mechanism. "...obviously, these worldviews collide. One group wants no one to have power over them, while the other seeks to exert power over others." But tech is already global, founders can leave (or not come to) the USA (or China), etc.

p 79: on the return of the “gentleman scientist" in the form of open source and decentralized science as a source of innovation.

p 79-80: "Someone who worships an almighty God won’t readily change their beliefs. Neither will someone who worships an almighty State." See works like The God that Failed about the failures of communism to get a sense of what a similar USA collapse in State power would look like to statist people who can't step outside of thinking of the State as their "almighty": "The American State is their God replacement, and they truly can’t envision a world without it." See also the mental model of the book Flatland where 2D beings simply can't grasp 3D reality, also the "base-rater" who lives by the base rate fallacy, living in a "zero-derivative" reality. 

p 81: "...there’s the sense that the US-dominated postwar order is either on its last legs or already over, and that the ancient legislators and endless remakes reflect a fading culture trying to hang on by its fingernails to prevent what comes next. Though people are gearing up as if on autopilot for a Second Cold War, it’s not obvious that the US will make it out of the first round given its internal Cold Civil War."

p 82: "If the news is fake, imagine history." "...once enough people see that the establishment has been lying about today’s events, they naturally begin to think the establishment might have been lying about yesterday’s news as well."

p 83: "If the US establishment could erase Mosul from memory in the age of the internet, you start to see how Putin’s Russia could pretend the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was just a 'special operation.' And you start to realize that it’s not sufficient to simply 'take the articles with a grain of salt,' and discount them a bit. By listening to the establishment, your perception of reality may be off by one million fold."

p 83-84: mechanisms of information distortion: 

* Channel distortion: amplifying pro-US info 100x and downranking anti-US info 100x, thus a 10,000x delta

* Narrative alignment: the fact that all mainstream media seems to follow a lockstep narrative "should remind you of the political power theory of history."

"Why do we know about these distortions of the present? It’s again because of a collision of Leviathans, because the Network routed information around the State, giving people actual rather than ostensible freedom of speech."

p 85: The Establishment's launch of the counter-decentralization in 2013. 

p 86ff: Once you see all the distortions of the present you start wondering about the past [this certainly has been my journey over the past several years!]: the author gives a bunch of examples of lies given to us about history; also citing a burst of movies/media in the 90s like The Matrix, etc about how everyone has been lied to.

p 88: Good quote about censorship and suppression: "Then a progression happened: after the obvious became rude, the rude became unsayable, the unsayable became unthinkable, and the unthinkable went unthought."

p 88: "The question now is whether a newly awakened US establishment can use its control of chokepoints like Google and its various 'fact-checkers' to suppress access to these inconvenient truths, or whether web3-mediated services will make it permanently difficult for the State to suppress the Network."

p 89: the "Jurassic Ballpark" how movies subtly distort your impression of the past: "If you haven’t studied something in depth, your mental model of it often implicitly reduces to a few scenes from a Hollywood movie." Other tropes as examples: the intrepid reporter; the evil/greedy CEO; the all-powerful US military.  

p 90ff: [Here see a list of excellent sources to help red-pill you about all the propaganda you've been fed and believe; some of these resources look like very good reading: see for example the book Human Smoke, Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, etc. Most of these are listed in the To Read section at the end of this post.]

p 93: On China now doing the big budget war movies saving the world, beating the Americans, etc., "They have the civilizational confidence." Our narratives and stories are "decentering" from the USA. 

p 93-100: A range of themes/theses for the coming era: 

1) The "fragmentation thesis" for the USA (that we were actually at peak centralization in the 50s and we have been decentralizing since in many ways), 

2) The "frontier thesis" (that the closing of the American frontier ca 1890 made the USA much more zero sum, but that a new frontier opened with the internet in the 1990s, which is surviving in more even decentralized forms of Web3 and crypto)

3) The "Fourth Turning thesis" (that we'll have significant physical and/or monetary conflict in America in the 2020s)

4) The "future is our past thesis" (sort of a "history rhymes" thesis, it repeats but not exactly, or repeats in a funhouse mirror sense)

p 101ff: On how you can't escape left/right if you want to start a new society; how left and right change places ("flippenings") and what the next flippening will look like. 

p 105: A really good insight on "political arbitrage": "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted" gains you political capital just like buying low and selling high gains you money capital. "...once you start reclassifying much of the moral language flying through the air as a kind of political arbitrage, you can start thinking about it more rationally. Political arbitrage involves backing a faction that is politically weaker today than it could or should be. An early backer that risks their own political capital to make a faction more justly powerful can also gain a slice of that power should it actually materialize. Think about the status that accrued to the Founding Fathers, to the early Bolsheviks, to Mao’s victorious communists, to the civil rights activists, or to the Eastern European dissidents after the Soviets fell." 

p 105: All of this leads to "a market for revolutionaries" allowing you to "map the tech ecosystem to the political ecosystem. You can analogize tech founders to political activists, venture capitalists to political philanthropists, tech trends to social movements" etc., with the difference that the funding trail for political movements is obscured to frustrate opposition research, whereas tech funding is bragged about openly!

p 106: Political visionaries succeeding in running a country would be like "going public" in a startup tech company. See Vaclav Havel, Viktor Orban, etc. There are other tiers here too: getting gov't funding for your movement, etc. 

p 107: The spatial theory of voting: Note that there are levels of perceptiveness or sophistication in seeing left/right: 1) you can assume they are fixed, permanent categories; 2) you can contest this binary view, noting that realignments happen; 3) the "spatial theory of voting"/relative tribal positioning

4) these axes move/rotate over longer timescales: "The winning team enjoys a brief honeymoon, after which it usually then breaks up internally into left and right factions again, and the battle begins anew."

p 108: A well-put summary of left/right here: "The left tactic is to delegitimize the existing order, argue it is unjust, and angle for redistributing the scarce resource (power, money, status, land), while the right tactic is to argue that the current order is fair, that the left is causing chaos, and that the ensuing conflict will destroy the scarce resource and not simply redistribute it... A key concept is that on a historical timescale, right and left are temporary tactics as opposed to defining characteristics of tribes."

p 108-9: "Frontiers mitigate factions" because when there's an open frontier, resources are less scarce and there are more safety valves; people can "leave" a system, so there is a fight or flight option. "The frontier means the revolutionary is simultaneously less practically obstructed in their path to reform (because the ruling class can’t stop them from leaving for the frontier and taking unhappy citizens with them), but also more ethically constrained (because the revolutionary can’t simply impose their desired reforms by fiat, and must instead gain express consent by having people opt into their jurisdiction)... That’s why reopening the frontier may be the most important meta-political thing we can do to reduce political conflict."

p 110: Note that we saw examples of fast left/right flipping during COVID. "Whatever position one group adopted, the other did the opposite. The parsimonious explanation is that it was just magnets repelling, factions fighting."

p 110: Another good quote here: "Putting it all together, we propose that (a) left and right are quantifiable phenomena we can see via the spatial theory of voting, (b) the left/right axis is real but rotates with time, (c) they’re ancient and ineradicable concepts, arguably on par with yin/yang or magnetic north/south, (d) they’re complementary tactics to gain access to scarce resources, (e) if one group uses a left tactic, the other is almost forced to adopt a right tactic in response, and vice versa, (f) the frontier reduces political left/right issues because it reduces conflict over scarce resources, (g) we can think of left as revolutionary tactics and right as ruling class tactics and (h) the tactics constantly swap hosts over historical timeframes."

p 110ff: Interesting views here on Left, Right and Libertarian cycles: 

Left cycle: the revolutionary class becomes the ruling class. Example: "Christians led a revolutionary movement against the Roman Empire, Protestants led a decentralist movement against the Catholic Church." "The revolutionary left that justified the rise to power morphed partially into an institutional right that justified the use of power. By its nature, a revolutionary group adopts leftist tactics to gain power, but once it wins, finds it needs to use rightist tactics to maintain power against a new crop of leftist insurgents."

p 112ff: Right cycle: "strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, and hard times create strong men." Example would be a small group of highly aligned Spartans rampaging through a decadent surrounding society, but then later having to put in place institutions, collect taxes, etc., as they scale, which attracts parasites to the wealth they produce/take. Eventually this will fall to another new group of Spartans outside.  

p 113ff: Libertarian cycle: Similar to the right cycle but imagine a company started by a founder who escaped the stifling bureaucracy of a big company, to start a new one that eventually grows from having 100% indispensible employees (a lean startup) to a more established country with more and more "dispensible" or interchangeable employees. This attracts parasites, ironically and eventually leads to the decline (or stultification) of the enterprise. Finally an employee leaves this "stifling bureaucracy" to start his own new firm, staring the cycle over again. 

p 114: To summarize: 

• The left cycle starts with a group of revolutionary leftists that then become
institutional rightists.
• The right cycle starts with a group of determined rightists that then become
decadent leftists.

• The libertarian cycle starts with a group of ideological libertarians that end up
building a bureaucratic state.

p 115: Good quote: "Most people haven’t studied enough history to have an intuition for cyclicity on a 100-year or longer timescale. But many people are familiar with the lifecycle of successful tech startups, which exhibit this behavior on a 10-year timescale." 

p 118ff: On flippenings, political or otherwise: On super-proletarian Alexei Stakhanov morphing into Archie Bunker (left working class becomes right): "...two very different portrayals of the white working class, just a few decades apart! How did they flip? Why did they flip?" Or: going from the celebration of the working man into making him a laughed-at foil.

p 120: "And who was [Archie Bunker] oppressing? Well, the *new* proletariat: women, minorities and LGBT." 

p 122: Wokeness as decentralized left: no leader, no organization, many unnamed people, no territory, etc. 

p 123: Good quote here ironically illustrating the problem with unions working toward communism: "...adversarial unionization actually harmed workers because (a) they had to pay union dues that gobbled up much of the pay raises, (b) they got a second set of managers in the form of the union bosses, (c) their actions lead to a reduction in competitiveness of their strike-ridden employer, and (d) in the event their country actually went communist they lost the ability to strike completely." (!!!!)

p 123: Also here on "cancelling": "cancellation actually harms the “marginalized” because (a) everyone can now cancel each other on some axis, making life highly unpleasant and (b) constant cancellation leads to a low-trust society."

p 124: The American flippening of 1865: Republicans had "moral authority" after the Civil War; through Reconstruction they turned it into economic authority [no: I'd argue they already had this beforehand]; the Democrats started repositioning themselves from the party of the South to the party of the poor; By 1965 that flip was complete; and then over the 50 years after that (1965-2015) most wealthy and status positions are held by Democrats, while the Republican party is now the party of the cultural proletariat. 

p 125-6: "This is why you see Democrats doing things like:

• tearing up over the Capitol six months after tearing down George Washington
• denouncing free speech
• setting up disinformation offices
• shifting from investigating the government to “investigating” the citizenry
• scripting the recruiting ads for the CIA and military
• putting Pride flags on attack helicopters

• advocating for corporations to fire people at will
• defending deplatforming as a private property right
• embracing the national security establishment
• allocating two billion dollars for the Capitol Police
• approving 40 billion dollars for war

...Now that the Democrats are strong, they are acting like rightists... This explains the weird flip-flops of American politics over the last few years."

p 127: "The [Democratic] party has completed a 155 year arc from the defeated faction in the Civil War to America’s ruling class."

p 128: "So that means that right now, immediately after the American realignment, we see all four types: (a) revolutionary class Democrats who still think of their party as the underdog, (b) ruling class Republicans who similarly (as David Reaboi would put it) “don’t know what time it is,” (c) revolutionary anti-establishment types like [Glenn] Greenwald, and (d) ruling class anti-revolutionaries like [David] Frum and [Liz] Cheney."

p 129: Another analogy: after the Civil War there was the Wild West as a distraction/safety valve. Decentralized tech (BTC, Web3) would be an analogy to that in the Second Civil War. 

p 129ff: The global flippening: communist states are now "ethnonationalists" (Russia, China) while capitalist countries are now "ethnomasochists." "In this flippening, the countries on the economic left moved to the cultural right, and countries on the economic right moved to the cultural left. The ideologies reversed, but the geopolitical rivalries remained the same."

p 130: "Woke America is to America as Soviet Russia was to Russia. It is the most left-wing country in the world, the place where whites go to the back of the line for vaccinations and the self-admitted sponsor of global revolution. Its core premise is ethnomasochism, which can be paraphrased as “white people are the worst”.

p 131: Good quote: "The primary axis is no longer the politico-economic axis of capitalism-vs-communism, but the ethno-cultural axis of ethnomasochism-vs-ethnonationalism. Is it the ultimate evil for a state to consciously represent its majority race (as America contends) or is it the ultimate good (as China contends)?

p 131-2: Perceptive: "Switzerland is no longer neutral, as it’s siding with the US now. Cryptocurrency and cryptography is now Switzerland, what Obama called the “Swiss bank account in your pocket.” And--as just noted--it offers an ethical alternative to both American ethnomasochism and Chinese ethnonationalism, namely pseudonymous meritocracy."

p 132ff: Balaji follows here with a mountain of examples supporting this new political paradigm where everything has flippened. 

p 134: "The capitalist-vs-communist divide of the 20th century was an official, declared economic divide. By contrast, today’s ethnonationalist-vs-ethnomasochist divide is an unofficial, undeclared cultural divide. It is nevertheless the primary global axis of conflict, and a very real reason for hostility between the Sino-Russians and the US Establishment."

p 135: Historical flippenings: Christian revolutionaries vs Rome to Christian kings; Protestant heresy to WASP establishment; etc. 

p 137ff: Parallel societies as a type of "fork" (in the blockchain sense): an anti-cancel society as an example; a sugar-free society; digital sabbath-practicers; a post-FDA society (a medical sovereignty zone, this example requires some level of recognition from the US); 

p 141: Why just "one commandment"? Because it gives a moral fervor, laser focus, taking a single broken aspect of society and building an opt-in community to solve it. One commandment is "in between being too shy and too overbearing... don’t try imposing an all-encompassing political ideology to start, because that’s too hard and means total warfare with your surroundings."

p 142: On how parallel systems are more peaceful; see the parallel system of the US vs the USSR; parallel systems in Asian countries around China (Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, S. Korea, etc).

Chapter 3: The Tripolar Moment

p 145ff: NYT vs CCP vs BTC; woke capital (ideology of the US as articulated by the USA's key propaganda outlet) vs communist capital (ideology of the CCP) vs crypto capital (stateless money and stateless capitalism). This is a model, if imperfect, of the world we're in. "We spend the energy to describe a specific tripolar model of the world because many still think it’s unipolar or bipolar,"

p 147ff: bipolarity during pre USSR collapse, leading to a period of unipolarity (1990s and 2000s), and now a multipolar world. 

p 151: The CCP as a network, analogized to NY Times readers: "What people would choose to constantly post new essays regurgitating the latest in regime propaganda, and indoctrinating their coworkers and family members? But it all fits if you think of them as China’s New York Times subscribers."

p 153: See the notable "We Will Always Be Here" Chinese military recruiting video here: https://youtu.be/JOWRembdPS8 and note the comments, dozens of them, saying "I'm here because of the Two Moms Army recruitment video" which itself is worth a watch to sense the zeitgeist of the US military in this era: https://youtu.be/MIYGFSONKbk . [The experience of watching these two videos side-by-side is ...unsettling... to say the least, particularly while thinking about where most of America's manufacturing is done now (in China!).]

p 157: Note the various poles of Balaji's triangle: NYT, CCP, BTC each are at odds with each other. NYT vs CCP (elites want war between these powers), NYT vs BTC (centralized power hates decentralization), CCP vs BTC (China has repeatedly banned BTC), etc. 

p 158: BTC as escape from US$/CCP dominance: "...one of our premises is that the Indians, Israelis, American dissidents, Chinese liberals, tech founders/investors, and people from other countries that want to maintain their own sovereignty will need to avail themselves of BTC/web3 for decentralized communication, transaction, and computation."

Chapter 4: Decentralization, Recentralization

p 160ff: Various scenarios offered here, the author admits lots of them will be wrong due to recursion (the system observes and reacts to itself), the fact that "the internet increases variance".. also "And volatility is good for insurgents and bad for incumbents, because the former only need to get lucky once while the latter need to keep staying lucky."

p 162: The "American Anarchy" scenario: "...a Second American Civil War triggered in part by a broke US government that attempts Bitcoin seizures... In the name of putting a lid on the anarchy and restoring “democracy”, the US establishment then silently copies" the CCP surveillance state. 

p 164: On the risks of viewing the world through "old lenses."

p 164: The "ascending world" (India) vs the "descending world" (USA) helpfully illustrated by this tweet thread: https://twitter.com/lastcontrarian/status/1482441292458061830

p 165: The Indian "State" compared to the Indian "Network" (diaspora)

p 171: On news and what it might look like when it goes fully digital (not pseudo-digital like it is now): "What does natively digital news look like? There are at least two concepts of interest here: morning dashboards replacing the morning newspaper, and cryptographically verifiable event feeds replacing tweets of unverifiable content."

p 171: "Dashboards > newspapers. If you are in tech, the first thing you look at each day may be a personal or company dashboard, like your Fitbit or your sales. This is good. The first thing you look at each day shouldn’t be random stories someone else picked. Should be carefully selected metrics you want to improve. This is a good vector of attack to definitionally disrupt newspapers."

p 172-3: "All value goes digital" (this is one of Balaji's more aggressive claims, he articulates a progression to it across these two pages.) 

p 174: On the productivity mystery: with all this tech, why aren't we way more productive? Why aren't we in a golden age? The great distraction, the great dissipation, the great dumbness; things like games, time-wasting, TPS forms, we're making dumb decisions on what to spend time on (as individuals and societies), etc. Also, maybe the problem is in the analog/digital interface (because humans are in the loop). 

p 176: Augmented Reality Glasses (AR) as a highly "foreseeable" invention per the author. 

p 177: Crypto as experimental macroeconomics: "Cryptoeconomics is transforming macroeconomics into an experimental subject. Why? Because you can actually issue a currency, set a monetary policy, get opt-in participants, and test your theories in practice. The proof is in the pudding. And, if successful, the pudding is worth many billions of dollars.... Now anyone can create a cryptocurrency, set monetary policy, and see what happens."

p 178: Is the US heading toward greater prosperity, greater tyranny, or greater anarchy? The USA as the TSA: "safety theater"

p 180ff: On the coming Civil War and why it's likely: 

1) polarization way up

2) state power/competence way down

3) prosperity declining

4) envy is increasing

5) foreign military defeat looms

6) US states are pulling away from the Feds

7) authority has lost respect

8) national divorce is discussed

9) radicalized movements (wokeness for example) reject the status quo

p 182: Interesting quote here on how Bitcoin maximalism will deal with wokeism: "[Bitcoin Maximalism] represents a root-and-branch rejection of the inflation that powers the US government and thus pays for everything. It fuses the worldview of Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and Ron Paul with Bitcoin. It naturally aligns with the loss of trust in institutions, with the suspicious individual who (understandably!) no longer trusts the federal government or US institutions on anything. It’s not merely an edit to the state, it’s the end of the state. And it’s a push from an ideological direction the Wokes are ill-prepared for, because it’s an aracial ultra-libertarianism rather than the white nationalism that folks like Marche and Walter think will be their foe."

p 183: "Bitcoin seizure could be the trigger event. All of this is a combustible mix, and there are many possible trigger events, but one that I see as particularly likely is a combination of (a) ruinous inflation followed by (b) a soaring BTC/USD price and then (c) the attempt by an insolvent federal government to seize Bitcoin from citizens... the general concept of asset seizure isn’t really even very sci-fi given the overnight freezing of funds for Canadian truckers and 145M Russian nationals."

p 184: "A US establishment attempt to seize Bitcoin in a time of high inflation would be like a repeat of FDR’s gold seizure (Executive Order 6102), except it’d be done during a time of declining state capacity rather than rising centralization... Thus, this seems like a relatively foreseeable event that could kick off the Second American Civil War — especially if the seizure bill is passed by the federal government and some states refuse to enforce it."

p 184: The Second American Civil War will look nothing like the first, it will be for minds, not territory. "The War Between the Networks" 

p 186: Dollar Greens vs Bitcoin Oranges, Greens as ruling class faction, Oranges as revolutionary class faction, it doesn't line up with Red/Blue. "...a fair number of conservative Republicans will side with Green, and why revolutionary Democrats will side with Orange."

p 187: "...a man in Brazil doesn’t necessarily care about American Republicans vs Democrats--he’s not an American nationalist, and doesn’t have a dog in that fight--but he may well hold Bitcoin. And so long as he doesn’t sell BTC for dollars, he’s indirectly supporting Maximalists. Yet his foreign support comes in an intangible and ideological form that feels acceptable to the proud American Bitcoin Maximalist, as opposed to (say) the explicit support of a foreign military getting involved on US soil."

p 188ff: On China and the likelihood of a total surveillance state, the technology for which they may export to other states. 

p 191: "I think it’s too much to think that China is going to 'go democratic.' America’s internal chaos means it is simply not an admirable model for much of the world anymore,"

p 192: Contrasting China's ascent in the past 30-40 years to the USA's squandering of its potential. 

p 193: "And the Chinese Control scenario we’ve described, while dystopian to the ambitious and freedom-seeking, will likely be acceptable to many people who prize stability over all else and see scenes of flames and gunfire (whether representative or not) coming from American Anarchy. It won’t be trivial to beat the average standard of living that Chinese Control may be capable of delivering. It will appeal to many."

p 193: "The international intermediate" countries that want a middle road between China's surveillance state and the USA's anarchy. See India and Israel as possible examples, also South Korea, Vietnam, the Visegrad countries (Czech, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary), etc. 

p 194: Alternate endings: the status quo in the USA continues in a zombified fashion; the West reinvents itself; the CCP triumphs, doesn't collapse, becomes the biggest economy, etc.; 

p 194: Good quote here: "If the Base Rate Fallacy is assuming tomorrow will be like today, then the Base Rate Fallacy Fallacy is assuming that the Base Rate Fallacy is always a fallacy. After all, tomorrow often is like today! The growther always thinks that change is going to happen, but it may not."

Chapter 5: From Nation States to Network States

p 200ff: Lengthy discussion here poking around at the abstraction of what a nation state actually is (it's not quite what you think); on currency demurrage (imposing a cost of carry for money to discourage hoarding, encourage use/spending of money and increase money velocity--a system now replaced by the much more subtle mechanism of currency inflation); on Joshua Keating's "8 Rules" of nation states to preserve "cartographic status"; a multipoint list of the assumptions of the nation state system; on the conflation of the term "nation" (a group of people with shared ancestry) with "state" (the entity that governs these people and holds a monopoly of violence over them), this can also be thought of as "the masses" and "the elite"; what exactly a "nation" is and the properties it has (united people with shared heritage and/or culture, language, etc; an admittedly fuzzy definition); see also stateless nations like the Catalonians, Basques, Kurds, etc.; on giga-states like China and India that are "civilization states"; on multi-ethnic states that are "proposition nations" (Singapore, the USA); 

p 207: "[Theodor] Herzl's work [The Jewish State] is a major inspiration for this book."

p 208ff: Philosophical definitions/definers of a nation, e.g.: Rousseau, Marx, etc.; with various overlapping ideas and divergences: primordialism vs propositionism, scale vs uniqueness, self-determination vs being sponsored by a great power, etc; 

p 209ff: What is a state? Definition: border, population, central government, interstate sovereignty, recognition, domestic monopoly on violence. 

p 210: comparing a state to a nation: 

"• The state is a political and legal entity, while a nation is a cultural, ethnic, and
psychological identity.
• The state is bound by laws and threat of force, while a nation is bound by
sentiments and linguistic/genetic/cultural alignment.
• The state is top-down and hierarchical, while the nation is bottom-up and peer-
to-peer.
• And, as above, the state has a fixed territory, a government and sovereignty over a territory, while a nation typically has shared language, culture, and/or ancestry."

p 212: Statecraft strategies, think of this like a codebase for making/justifying a state; "Karl Marx’s zero-sum worldview made it easy to justify a Soviet state with a massive Red Army to destroy the capitalist oppressors. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writing by contrast didn’t give much justification for the use of force itself, but furnished a vision of consensual communistic utopia that sat just on the other side of the Red Army’s liberating violence." Interesting here to think about Rousseau as a utopian.

p 213: "The strengths and weaknesses of various statecraft strategies can be discussed at length, and we’ll return to this topic. But for now: before you design your ideal state, you should have some idea of what others thought their ideal state to be, and how that worked out." [One thing I like about this book and how Balaji thinks: he's never a "Year Zero" kind of guy; he always looks to prior historical examples, he's aware of and humble in the face of history.]

p 214ff: How were modern nation states formed? History (mapmaking, "print capitalism", WWII, Peace of Westphalia, etc) vs Patronage (France helping the early USA in order to stick it to England) vs Military. Note "you don’t need to get full sovereignty but can instead contract with an existing sovereign for defense. In fact, this is actually what most “real” countries already do--few truly have full sovereignty, as most contract out their defense in a similar manner to the US or (nowadays) China."

p 217: How does a nation state expand and contract? 

Demographically 

Geographically (by conquest or purchase like the Louisiana Purchase)

Economically

Ideologically

p 217: On how states influence nations and vice versa:

* Language as unifying force: the French language as a sort of post hoc unification force, same with modern Italian 

* The 38th parallel was arbitrary but after 70 years a tremendous cultural gap formed between the two Koreas

p 218: "...what is another large-scale way of organizing people in the physical world that is not a nation state?" multiethnic states, transnational movements (Catholic Church); stateless nations (Kurds); terror groups (ISIS); nomadic tribes (Roma, Masai); ethnic diasporas (Japanese, Jews); local clans (Afghanistan); supranational elites (EU, IMF elites); 

p 219: Technological underpinnings of the modern nation state: 

* Mapmaking

* print capitalism

* guns/violence ("The advent of firearms (and crossbows, and cannons) destabilized the feudal hierarchy...The gun helped catalyze the transition from feudal hierarchy to nationalist republic"). 

"So: a combination of mapmaking, printing, and shooting helped set the stage for the post-Westphalian nation state, where a map delimited borders, a printed document established the law, and a guy with a gun shot you for crossing those borders or breaking the law."

p 220: Back to our definition of the Network State: 

"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."

p 220: "...you can’t found a network state directly. Instead, you found a startup society and hope to scale it into a network state that achieves diplomatic recognition from a pre-existing government."

p 221: Startup society --> network union --> network archipelago --> diplomatic recognition --> network state; also a social network with a moral innovation (missionary movements outcompete mercenary movements); a capacity for collective action; in-person civility and an integrated cryptocurrency that manages records, statistics and other bureaucratic processes; an archipelago of physical territories. 

p 223: Interesting claim here that the moon landing was the penultimate great thing the USA has done (followed by defeating the Soviet Union), and now we've devolved into a two-tribe, zero-sum society. Harsh but rings true.

p 224: On the physical archipelago: "You network these clusters together using the internet into a network archipelago, eventually using newer technologies to make them more real. For example, you can make the flag of a network state appear to anyone with augmented reality glasses and the right NFT, as per this visual. You can also make doors open on command for community members, where their ENS name is their login. The point is that a network state is not a purely digital thing. It has a substantial physical component: all the buildings around the world crowdfunded by its members."

p 225: A "smart social contract" as a crypto-network society version of Rousseau's social contract. 

p 226: "...how does a startup society deal with physical criminals? The short answer is that for a long time, it doesn’t--it leaves that to the surrounding legacy society, much like a centralized crypto exchange collaborates with traditional offline law enforcement."

p 228-9: Balaji goes through his multipart definition once more, but by "breaking it" by pulling out individual components of that definition. Examples: without a social network you have no messaging or community or profiles; no capacity for collective action means just a group of libertarians with no cooperation nor self-sacrifice; no integrated cryptocurrency means you can be subject to, say, the USA demonetizing you, or using digital finance weaponry against you; no physical territory means you can't do the things that can only be done in meatspace; etc.

p 229n: Note the story of San Marino, a microstate inside Italy and one of the few that "didn’t get rolled up into a 20th century universalist empire."

p 230: "Put another way: if you don’t consciously set the capital of your network state to be virtual, it’ll be physical. And if it’s physical, the capital is centralized in one place, and can get invaded by a nation state. But if it’s instead a virtual capital, with a backend that is encrypted and on-chain, then--in the fullness of

time--you can host an entire subset of the metaverse there, assuming blockspace increases as bandwidth did."

p 231ff: What is the Network State System? "Once the first diplomatic recognition comes, and the first true network state arises, more will follow. That means we need to start thinking about the network state system."

p 232: "The network state system assumes many pieces of the internet will become invisible to other subnetworks. In particular, small network states may adopt invisibility as a strategy; you can’t hit what you can’t see."

p 232: "The network state system embraces the fuzzy division of the internet into different sovereign subnetworks. It is a probabilistic digital division of people rather than a deterministic physical division of land. People migrate digitally and physically between network states; the citizenry is as dynamic as the land of a nation state is static." Also: "N networks per citizen." "sovereignty via cryptography" which can be thought of as a complement to (or even replacement for) a military. 

p 234: Digital primary, physical secondary "...in a network state, everything physical is downstream of lines of code and enforced by cryptography, just as in a nation state, everything physical is downstream of pieces of paper and enforced by the police and military."

p 234: Also: "...the network state system assumes that states like the USA and PRC will continue centralizing the power of their tech companies into one all-seeing dashboard, capable of surveilling, deplatforming, freezing, and sanctioning millions at once, or anyone at will. This digital power is currently exercised transnationally and without the consent of the governed."

p 235: "Thus, the legitimacy of a network state comes not from top-down declamations, but from bottom-up consent, as each netizen has opted in. A truly oppressive or incompetent network state loses them to exit, or doesn’t gain citizens in the first place. And no state is strong enough to block the ultimate exit that cryptocurrency represents."

p 235: Network state as a term: "the network is the nation" "the network is the territory" "the network is the state" "the network is the Leviathan"

p 238: "Here’s a concrete example:

• 0-network : Facebook at inception, 1 person founder, no users
• 1-network : Facebook at Harvard, one month after founding
• N-network : Facebook today, 3+ billion users
And here’s the underlying definitions that inform that example:
• 0-network : an aspirational social network startup with no users
• 1-network : a coherent community
• N-network : a massive global network of networks"

p 239ff: "...we can now give a computational answer to the question of 'what is a nation?'” [what follows here is some software-speak on how to think about aspects of a nation]:

* geographic distance: great circle distance on surface of earth
* network distance: degrees of separation in a social network
* genetic distance: eg, Fst (fixation index) or another measure
* linguistic distance: eg, lexicostatistical measures
* economic distance: eg, 1-cosine similarity
* ideological distance: degree of similarity in belief as expressed by spatial theory of voting

p 241-2: What does a network state look like on a map? On a physical map, it's "an archipelago of interconnected enclaves." On a digital map, first, "To gain some intuition for digital space, realize that it is very different from physical space:

* Dimensionality: multiple dimensions

* Plasticity: Spotify doing a deal with Uber would be like South Africa suddenly appearing next to New York City: suddenly two networks get bridged

* Speed: see FB's reach in a few years vs the British Empire's global footprint at its zenith

* Elasticity: it's hard to create more physical land, but space in the digital world is infinite

* Invisibility: borders between networks are invisible, unlike national borders which are clearly demarcated

p 242: See the "re-encryption of the world" from public social network sites to things like Signal, anons, etc.

p 242: "In short, our intuitions for digital space are just completely different from physical space. We’ll return to this topic, but recognize that it really is a fundamental difference: while the nation state is based on a deterministic physical division of land into states, the network state is based on probabilistic digital division of people into subnetworks."

p 242-3: "...the US is not really a “nation” state. It’s at least a binational state, what we’d call a 2-network, with two strongly connected subgraphs at each other’s throats. These two nations are packed into the same physical environment, but are far apart mentally. A network state makes the opposite tradeoff. It’s a group of people spread out in physical space, but highly aligned in digital space. It’s a 1-network, not an N-network."

p 243ff: How is a network state founded? "You’re founding a startup society, not a network state. A startup society is a new community built internet-first, usually for the purpose of solving a specific social problem in an opt-in way."

p 244: "...there are different paths to a network state, and different (and completely valid) intermediate end points--just like you can run a small business, a lifestyle business, do a merger/acquisition..."

p 245ff: A strange three page discussion of "public displays of alignment" of a network union here. 

p 247: "In the 2000s, most technologists didn’t care that much about how national currencies were run. The parameter choices of a currency were things only central bankers cared about. What’s the interest rate? Is it a deflationary, inflationary, or even demurrage currency? Which actors have root access to the system and under what circumstances can they be deplatformed? And so on." Thus the introduction of the concept of "tokenomics" for how you run your cryptocurrency.. the same analogy holds for how nations and states are formed now applies to network unions: "all previously obscure details of how nations and states formed are newly relevant to network union founders. There’s an idea maze for nation formation just as there is for cryptoeconomics. The first question any network union founder needs to be able to answer is: what is your nation formation strategy?"

p 248ff: Bootstrapping recognition; why recognition is critical, it's a social phenomenon.

p 250: "Just as it was easier to start a new digital currency than to reform the Fed, it may be easier to start a new country than to reform yours."

p 253: "What underpins the new dynamic of network states is the intrinsic lack of scarcity of digital territory, the return of unclaimed land and terra nullius, the reopened frontier. As we discuss later on, it was this frontier, this room for experimentation, that built America in the first place... Constant, nonviolent growth is now possible--not by conquest or coercion, but through volition and innovation."

p 254: "...examples that are adjacent to network states, but don’t quite fit."

Things far away from a network state: Your startup; Twitter/social networks ("In our terminology, it is very much an N-network, not a 1-network.); Google; WeWork (which is a utility; "you don’t leave your laptop out of sight because you don’t know anyone there"); Bitcoin (it does one thing and is silent on a zillion other things).

p 255-6: Things that are closer: a political party; "a network of hacker houses"; r/keto; DAOs; a city-state ("...a city state is not a network state. Why? Because a city state is concentrated in one location, and can be invaded by a stronger power, while a network state is geographically decentralized and encrypted."

p 256: "Here are some of the key enablers of the network state:"

1) The Internet is to the USA as the Americas were to the UK.

2) Bitcoin constrains legacy states ("...it guarantees the sovereignty of both the individual citizen and the network state itself. Neither can have their funds stolen by each other, or by a hostile third party.")

3) Web3 enables new chains, decentralized identities, and censorship-resistant communities ("...we can allow not just censorship-resistant communication, but censorship-resistant communities, voluntary gatherings of people that can exist outside the interference or surveillance of legacy states.")

4) Remote and Starlink/satellite broadband open up the map.

5) Mobile makes us more mobile. ("...you can change the law under which you live [by moving away].") (see also "Tiebout sorting": per Wikipedia: "...this model holds that individual choices on where to live would lead to the equilibrium provision of local public goods in accordance with the tastes of residents, thereby sorting the population into optimum communities. Basically, if an individual doesn’t like the public goods provision of one town, they can move to the next town over.")

6) VR builds a capital in the cloud, AR mirrors it on the land.

7) Social disintermediated the legacy media.

8) Google, Facebook, etc showed us what was possible

p 259: "The nation state was enabled by maps of the world, tools to communicate laws, and the guns to enforce them. The network state is enabled by the creation of a new world (the internet), the software to code and communicate policies, and the cryptography to enforce them."

Chapter 6: Appendix

p 261: on "dark talent": people who are passed over by the establishment, who have talent, who could do great things if given an opportunity. "These are exactly the kinds of people who we expect will found startup societies and network states."

To Read: 

Peter Turchin: War and Peace and War

***Peter Turchin: Ages of Discord

Ray Dalio: Principles for a Changing World Order

Will and Ariel Durant: The Lessons of History

Isaac Asimov’s fictional treatment of psychohistory in his Foundation series.

***Janet Malcolm: The Journalist and the Murderer

***Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey: The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything

Ashley Rindsberg: The Grey Lady Winked

Stanford University Cryptography 1 Course (free: course syllabus here)

 ***Stephan Wolfram: A New Kind of Science

Stephan Wolfram: Adventures of a Computational Explorer

Franco Moretti: Graphs, Maps, and Trees

David Reich: Who We Are and How We Got Here

Jacob Burckhardt: Force and Freedom

James Lacey: "Gold, Blood, and Power: Finance and War Through the Ages" (monograph link to PDF) 

***Rod Dreher: The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

Lee Staples: Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing

Alberto Mingardi and Deirdre McCloskey: The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State

***Richard H. Crossman, Ed: The God That Failed 

***Alexei Yurchak: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation 

Sean McMeekin: The Russian Revolution: A New History

J. Storrs Hall: Where’s My Flying Car?

***Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke

Viktor Suvorov: The Chief Culprit

Wolfgang Schivelbush: Three New Deals

Frank Dikötter: The Cultural Revolution

Bryan Burrough: Days of Rage

Amity Shlaes: The Forgotten Man

Mel Gordon: Voluptuous Panic

***Luo Guanzhong (trans. C. H. Brewitt-Taylor): Romance of the Three Kingdoms 

Lorenz M. Luthi: The Sino-Soviet Split

Nancy J. Weiss: Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR

***David Hackett Fischer: Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Aaron L. Friedberg: Getting China Wrong 

***Jon Ronson: So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Douglas Arnold Hyde: Dedication and Leadership Techniques (monograph, link to PDF)

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr: Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

***Christian Brose: The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Stephen Marche: The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

***Barbara F. Walter: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

Harsh Madhusudan and Rajeev Mantri: A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State 

Alyssa Ayres: Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World

***Albert O. Hirschman: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Roger Garside: Coming Alive: China After Mao

Roger Garside: China Coup

Joshua Keating: Invisible Countries

Theodor Herzl: The Jewish State