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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled The network state from 2021 by Balaji Srinivasan, usually known as Balaji, published on the 1729 website. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see a possible future state. This article introduces the network state, what it means and how one can be started.

Balaji starts with the one sentence summary: a network state is a social network with an agreed-upon leader, an integrated cryptocurrency, a definite purpose, a sense of national consciousness and a plan to crowdfund territory. Therefore, the network state is a proposition not for a nation, but it can become one. There is a peaceful, reproducible process for turning an online community premised on a proposition into a physical sate with a virtual capital, the network state, the sequel to the nation state.

The agreed-upon leader is the founding influencer who organises the online community that eventually buys land in the physical world, but that land is not necessarily contiguous. Balaji brought up the example of Indonesia where the islands are separate but still connected to one government. What if this concept is extended to the whole world and people are scattered around the globe? That is a visual of a network state. Contemporary precedents include coworking communities and the offices of Google: globally distributed, networked real estate gated by the common login of a corporate account.

A network state is thus an archipelago of digitally-linked, interconnected enclaves. It is also a country which can be started from a personal computer. It can be a territory one can acquire but not conquer, a community aligned around cryptographic consensus, a city state in the cloud, a body based on math rather than science, a group organised by geodesic over geographic distance, a state that recruits like a startup, and a nation built from the internet rather than disrupted by it.

An important feature of the modern era is that a billion-dollar company, a million person online community, a new digital currency or even a city can be started from a laptop. Anyone can choose to become a founder at any time, and take on the immense stress and risk to build something from scratch. Or they can choose to remain a citizen and be gainfully employed by a founder or by a vehicle that a founder once set up. What if we could generalise this construction beyond companies, communities and currencies?

Supposedly, people can be separated into founders and citizens of network states. Anyone can switch between these paths any time, just like an employee can choose to work for somebody else or starting their own company. In other words, there are four transitions possible:

1. Citizen to founder with begin to gather online community, write up a founding document, create a cryptocurrency, and declare the intent to start a network state – this seems quixotic but there are already examples like Satoshi Nakamoto’s plan to start a new currency in 2009.
2. Founder to citizen with stepping down and for example selling the network state to another network state or shutting it down for good, obviously notifying your citizens.
3. Citizen to citizen with joining a network state, or even more network states, depending upon how the different network states allow multiple citizenship.
4. Founder to founder with starting one, selling it or shutting it down and then starting a new one with different purposes for example.

The idea that anyone can become a founder of a network state is a vision of global equality of opportunity. It is an improvement over the legitimating myth that anyone can become president of the United States, which isn’t really true, as only around 4 percent of the world is American and only a subset of those people satisfy the age, birth, and residency requirements to become president. So long as the US still rules the world, this means that most of the people the US rules cannot themselves rise to rule the US. In fact, once we realise that there have been only 46 US presidents, all of them American, but that there are thousands of billionaires, most of whom are not American, we realise that it is more realistic to become a tech billionaire than to become the president.

By extending this concept, anyone is allowed in the world with an internet connection to become not just a tech founder, but a network state founder. Whether the next Washington is Brazilian, Indian, Nigerian, or Eastern European, this mechanism lets them rise to global leadership. It permits a positive-sum avenue for the politically ambitious while allows people who want to be just citizens to remain citizens.

Once we visualise a network state as a combination of a digital social network with an integrated cryptocurrency and a physical network of distributed enclaves, we realise that it is much easier to acquire than to conquer. The network state or its subnetwork can be acquired from one founder to another, like selling Facebook or Instragram. A subnetwork can be defined by a geographical location or all of those citizens who expressed their collective interest to have another citizenship or become independent. This change would also manifest in the physical world as well.

In theory, all of this can be done with current legal infrastructure. It’s just like one multinational acquiring the digital, physical and human resources of another, except it extends to people’s residences rather than simply their offices and those people become citizens, though they can always leave for any new network state that admits them. Over time, however, the digital infrastructure for the network states should exist on the blockchain allowing the recording of all real estate transactions, citizen record maintenance, and globally consistent management of its citizens. This is a recipe for nonviolent competition between countries.

The network state reduces violence on another dimension: network states are hard to conquer due to their decentralised geographical locations and physical invisibility. The geographical distribution of the network itself is a deterrent to physical force. Just like cryptocurrency, the decentralisation deters violence. Secondly, the network state doesn’t have physical signs of its boundaries like France and Germany do in real life and on maps. Social network membership is invisible to all but the network operators. This has huge implications. Nationalism is hard without maps of physical space, you have to see the map to fight over the borders. So because citizenship in a network state is invisible to a satellite, these imagined communities are invisible countries. It’s the return of secret societies at scale, as secret states. Network states thus have option of reducing violence by encrypting the map itself: you can’t hit what you can’t see.

The nation state is already dissolving with global technologies and applications, like Facebook and Snapchat. People are sharing their lives with others not in their own physical environment but over the globe. This undermines the assumption of the nation state that people who live near each other will share the same values therefore agree upon laws, for example. Instead, what we find is that people share values with people who are close tot hem in their social network, not in their physical space.

The network state is enabled partly by the fact that we are transitioning from a primarily geographical distance driven world to a geodesic driven world. The geographic distance is the distance on the surface of the Earth, while geodesic distance is the number of degrees of separation between nodes, here people, in a social network along the shortest path. Transitioning from the former geographical distance to the geodesic one means that the fundamental division is less the visible geographic borders of the nation state, than the invisible geodesic borders of the social network. This in turn means that we need to reconceptualise the state as a primarily digital entity, as a network state.

It is the geodesic distance that enables this fluidity. Individuals and entire networks can instantly become adjacent to anyone else in a social network. Individuals can also move around the map to become adjacent to others in the physical world. But unlike individuals or networks, nation states cannot do this. They cannot just move around the map at will. There is a term for this: dynamic digital geography. And the popularisation of the metaverse makes this more than a metaphor, the digital territory a network inhabits can instantly be picked up and made adjacent to any other with the press of a key, just like moving a cruise ship around the world, but more cheaply and quickly.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. The network state is a social network with an agreed-upon leader, an integrated cryptocurrency, a definite purpose, a sense of national consciousness, and a plan to crowdfund territory.
2. The network state can be started from a laptop and can be acquired but cannot be conquered.
3. The network state is based upon the fluidity enabled by the geodesic-driven world after the geographically-driven nation states.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What happens to those who don’t want to or don’t know how to connect to a network state?
2. Are you part of network state already?
3. How would your network state look like if you founded one?

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