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

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

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

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

When reading it, think of this work as a toolbox, not a manifesto. You dont need to agree with all of it to get something out of it. Weve structured it in modular form for that reason. presents our proposed solution for maintaining liberal values in an illiberal world: startup societies and network states.

If youre a partisan of the US establishment or the CCP, you may not agree with our problem statement at all. If youre an orthodox Bitcoin maximalist, you likely wont agree with every aspect of our proposed solution. And if youre coming in from another school of thought, you may only agree with parts of the problem or solution as weve framed them. Nevertheless, we believe theres enough flexibility in the idea of 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 capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually 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 the minds. That is, if the nation state system starts with the map of the globe and assigns each patch of land to a single state, the network state system starts with the 7+ billion humans of the world and attracts each mind to one or more networks.

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

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.

OK, thats a mouthful! Its lengthy because there are many internet phenomena that share some but not all of the properties of a network state. For example, neither Bitcoin nor Facebook nor a DAO is a network state, because each lacks certain qualities like diplomatic recognition which are core to anything wed think of as the next version of the nation state.

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

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

The first thing we notice is that a network state isnt physically centralized like a nation state, nor limited in scale like a city state. Its geographically decentralized and connected by the internet.

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

The third thing we see is how central the real-time census is to the network 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 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.

That doesnt mean each network state must grow to infinity, or that all states need accept the same kind of person, but that the community of network states as a whole is focused on building admirable societies that people want to join. Different states will focus on different metrics; imagine a network state premised on improving its citizens overall life expectancy , or one aimed at provably right-shifting the income distribution for all. You get what you measure.

Technology has allowed us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. But can we use it to create new cities, or even new countries? A key concept is to go cloud first, land last but not land never by starting with an online community and then materializing it into the physical world. We get there in seven steps:

1. Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater. Anyone can found one, just like anyone can found a company or cryptocurrency. And the founders legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow them.