Balaji Srinivasan - The Network State: How To Start a New Country

Are you the kind of person who skims the beginning just to see whetherto read the entire thing? Youre in luck.

Weve prepared summaries of the concepts behind startup societies and networkstates. Just click those links if youre impatient. And of course, forthe full experience, you can read it one page at a time.

Speaking of pages, every section of this book is online and shareableas an individual web page. For example, the URL to this section is toget the latest version on your Kindle.

When reading it, think of this work as a toolbox, not a manifesto. Youdont need to agree with all of it to get something out of it. Wevestructured it in modular form for that reason. presents ourproposed solution for maintaining liberal values in an illiberalworld: startup societies and network states.

If youre a partisan of the US establishment or the CCP, you may notagree with our problem statement at all. If youre an orthodox Bitcoinmaximalist, you likely wont agree with every aspect of our proposedsolution. And if youre coming in from another school of thought, youmay only agree with parts of the problem or solution as weve framedthem. Nevertheless, we believe theres enough flexibility in the ideaof the network state that you can customize it and make it your own.

But what exactly is a network state?

In one informal sentence:

A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacityfor collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world andeventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.

When we think of a nation state, we immediately think of the lands,but when we think of a network state, we should instantly think of theminds. That is, if the nation state system starts with the map of theglobe and assigns each patch of land to a single state, the networkstate system starts with the 7+ billion humans of the world andattracts each mind to one or more networks.

Heres a more complex definition that extends that concept andpre-emptively covers many edge cases:

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a senseof national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity forcollective action, an in-person level of civility, an integratedcryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smartcontract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, avirtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enoughpopulation, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure ofdiplomatic recognition.

OK, thats a mouthful! Its lengthy because there are many internetphenomena that share some but not all of the properties of a networkstate. For example, neither Bitcoin nor Facebook nor a DAO is anetwork state, because each lacks certain qualities like diplomaticrecognition which are core to anything wed think of as the nextversion of the nation state.

(If you want to skip ahead, we expand on each part of the definitionin , because it needs to exclude thingswe dont typically think about, like stateless nations.)

A picture helps. The dashboard above shows what a million-personnetwork state looks like on the map. Specifically, it depicts anetwork state with 1.7 million people, more than 157 billion dollarsin annual income, and a 136 million square meter footprint.

The first thing we notice is that a network state isnt physicallycentralized like a nation state, nor limited in scale like a citystate. Its geographically decentralized and connected by theinternet.

The second thing we see is that you could feasibly start this kind ofcountry from your computer. That is, just as Facebook grew from onepersons laptop, a million-person network state that owns a globalarchipelago of physical territory could start as a one-person startupsociety, as shown in this gif: thenetworkstate.com/networkstate.gif.

The third thing we see is how central the real-time census is to thenetwork state. The dashboard shown combines concepts from coins,companies, and countries to focus a society on growth in people,annual income, and real estate footprint.

Continued growth is a continuous plebiscite, a vote of confidence bythe people inside who remain and those outside who apply. Roughlyspeaking, a successful network state is one that attracts alignedimmigrants, and an unsuccessful network state is one that loses them.

That doesnt mean each network state must grow to infinity, or thatall states need accept the same kind of person, but that the communityof network states as a whole is focused on building admirablesocieties that people want to join. Different states will focus ondifferent metrics; imagine a network state premised on boosting itscitizens life expectancy, or one aimed at provably right-shifting theincome distribution. You get what you measure.

Technology has allowed us to start new companies, new communities, andnew currencies. But can we use it to create new cities, or even newcountries? A key concept is to go cloud first, land last but notland never by starting with an online community and thenmaterializing it into the physical world. We get there in seven steps:

1. Found a startup society. This is simply an online communitywith aspirations of something greater. Anyone can found one, justlike anyone can found a company or cryptocurrency. Andthe founders legitimacy comes from whether people opt to followthem.