Balaji Srinivasan on the network state
Balaji argues the internet now lets founders start countries the way they start companies and currencies: recruit a highly aligned community online, hold it to a numerical goal, give each culture its own AI, currency and network, and manifest it in physical startup cities that use local rules and shared ownership to run new experiments. Community and content come first and law only encodes consensus; where reasonable he says comply with host states and exit where not, retreating to the digital terrain where builders are strong. He imagines an encrypted state that cannot be mapped, and says the movement is still at step three: getting the first communities working.
16 points · 7 appearances · 2019–2025
How the view evolved
New countries are the next step → Still step three: communities first
Defensible 2024-to-2025 downshift: the 2024 Singapore opening pitches the full arc to new countries on par with legacy nation states; in the 2025 closing Q&A he explicitly resets the near-term ambition to getting 10-100 working internet communities ('we're still in step three'), deferring statehood to a later step.
Up next
2021–2025 · changed view
“Really these are two halves of the same coin because what crypto really does is its property and property rights and speech rights and encryption and civil liberties outside of the control of abusive states and if your state by the way is mostly convincing rather than coercing then people don't really need to use crypto quite as much I mean you can use it for lots of other things you'd use it for getting around centralized companies not just states because you you know the power of Facebook or a Twitter is also something you can decentralize with crypto which is very important so even if you don't buy the state argument all the corporate argument is important but the more abusive a state is like a Venezuela the more important crypto is it's kind of that last bulwark the check and balance is actually outside the state.”
2021–2026 · changed view
“By analogy we have different categories for cash currency stocks bonds mortgages art et cetera all these scarce assets today the fundamental innovation of the blockchain was the ability to represent scarcity digitally because before blockchains you could you could transfer or rather you could you could copy rather than transfer something right I can copy a file to your hard drive what I couldn't do is transfer it in such a way that you knew I no longer had possession of it.”
2025–2026 · changed view
“So because when they talk about AGI, they talk about AGI as implicitly a unitary thing. we will get to AGI and then it will go to infinity and we'll be like you know raptured singularity kind of thing even though that's implicit and you know the way I because I've been thinking so much about crypto and other kinds of things I was like well there's a different sort of implicit school of thought which is polytheistic agi right do we have rather than the vengeful god do we have war of the gods do we have many superhuman intelligences all from different cultural backgrounds that have the mores and the values imprinted on them. And very early on, I had I had a tweet that said at a minimum there's going to be American AI and Chinese AI. And if we're lucky, there'll be decentralized open-source, you know, crypto style AI because at the time the American AI was woke, highly woke. This is 2022. And I knew I knew that China was going to like stop at nothing to copy it. So I knew we were going to get at least two.”
2021–2025
“Here's a mechanistic explanation for why that happens, okay? So visualize NYT and centralized media as a hub, okay? And then here's a spoke coming off, and this is, let's say, Bitcoin, and then it's another one that's like India, and here's another one that's like Japan or Iraq or whatever, right? These various spokes. And if you are an expert on Bitcoin, you have better local information on that topic, in, like, the Hayekian sense, but not simply about transactions, just other things, events that are happening. And so you have a better source of information than the centralized hub, and so you know that what they're saying is, is false about this topic or it's misleading. But then when you go and read about, uh, you know, India or Japan or Iraq or Hollywood or what have you, you do not have, you're not in that spoke, right? So you don't have local information there, you're relying on the hub, which is like a, you know, a hall of mirrors that's giving you a noisy reflection of what's happening in Japan or what's happening in India, okay? It's reflecting back to you something that's false, but you don't have a direct peer-to-peer connection with India, with Japan, with Hollywood, to get better information.”