We’ve recently become aware of Balaji Srinivasan, the concept of ‘Network State’ (which we already used in The Gateway), and the whole Gray tribe thing. After slogging through Balaji’s book, suffering through part of Moment of Zen: Balaji On How The Tech Tribe Can Save Our Cities Part 2, and reading several angry tweets, we now believe we possess enough knowledge to opine on the subject.
(There's been a little addition to our observations about the Network State here)
HUNGER GAMES
The whole tribes + building cities stuff comes across as The Battle of Polytopia made by someone who read one too many Young Adult dystopian novels and ended up rooting for the wrong side. So, the Grays are going to take back San Francisco from the Blues (Left-wingers) with the help of sympathetic police officers and will bring back order. This will happen little by little, with the Grays buying flats, then whole buildings, and finally whole streets, after which the access to these areas will be controlled via keycards to keep out the pooping addicts and their Blue enablers. When they’ve achieved victory, they’ll celebrate with a parade so dorky and cringeworthy that if it ever materialized, Leni Riefenstahl would crawl out of her grave and punch Balaji on the face. All this will be done wearing grey shirts because, as everyone knows, lack of colour is a clear sign that you’re one of the good guys. At least the grey won’t clash with the Bitcoin orange, but we’re not sure we’d trust them with designing the police uniforms like Balaji wants. Before starting to buy police loyalty with weekly banquets and jobs in security for their children (is this Gray thing going to include a caste system?) they should really make finding their own Hugo Boss a priority. Also, will the Grays be developing their own water supply? Because all the rest of San Francisco, or, if the takeover is complete, California, have to do to thwart their plans is close the tap and wait until they all faint from dehydration to reclaim their territory. As if all this weren’t enough to make Balaji look like an idiot, he also praises AI’s destructive power as a weapon that will rid the city of Blue journalists and lawyers, and therefore reduce their control of it. It’s like he’s checking items on a How to Make Everyone Hate Me list.😒 His antagonistic ways towards Left-wingers here are interesting, because in his book, he didn’t exclude them from the Network State future. You could argue that by ‘Blues’ he just means the Establishment, but he also complains about the Blues having taken over part of the Grays’ natural territory - social media - and how Musk buying Twitter was a victory; and we all know which Blues are more active on social media. Yeah, we’re not buying the softened, more inclusive book version of Balaji’s ideas.
YAWN
The above was taken from the Moment of Zen podcast and was focused on a more local level, however, in Balaji’s The Network State, the cloud revolution goes global. By the way, the book can be downloaded as a PDF for free or bought as an e-book at Amazon (are the people who choose to pay for the book deemed too stupid to join any future Network States, or are they welcomed for their willingness to part with their money?) and because we’re not dummies, we opted for the former. In the book, Balaji goes into more detail about the greater significance of his vision and how it connects to political philosophical concepts like Rousseau’s social contract and Hobbes’s Leviathan. He also explains the importance of knowing the past so you can defend the future - after all, none of that worked, so why can’t we try this, instead? - and presents several possible scenarios of chaos that may befall this tripolar world that is being pulled in several directions by the American establishment personified by The New York Times, the Chinese Communist Party, and the anarchic power of Bitcoin. The solution? A fourth pole in the form of Network States! If all this sounds boring, pretentious, and condescending, well, it’s because it is. It’s also repetitive.😴 There are some more readable bits, but for the most part this is a crappy book and we’d feel sorry for all the people who paid for this if they weren’t likely a bunch of AI & crypto bros. At one point, Balaji mentions Girard in a way that made us think of The Straussian Moment, but not only was Peter Thiel’s essay a lot shorter, it also felt like it had been written by a genuinely weird thinker who at least sounded like he knew what he was talking about; Balaji comes across as if he just read Wikipedia and is regurgitating big words and concepts to make it all look deeper and more meaningful than it really is. So, the Network State becomes the reopening of the mythical ‘frontier’ and the path to free Humanity from all the restrictions imposed by those old, stuffy Nation States, which are responsible for the technological stagnation that’s preventing us from living our best lives. Because the Network State isn’t limited by established borders - it’s born online, out of communities united by common values, beliefs, goals regardless of geographical location, and therefore much more cohesive and true than people pushed together due to their place of birth. However, those old, stuffy Nation States are still needed for the Network States to be accepted by the whole world and not be trampled like some embarrassing micro-nation - they’re the only ones who can recognize them and offer them legitimacy, at least until Network States can start to recognize each other. Except, who does the recognizing matters, and so far, the countries playing along with this are either not important enough, or their current rulers are shady AF. Does he think the UN will accept Próspera because El Salvador and/or Palau said so? The Grays aren’t the only tribe to consider - we doubt the older, established, less volatile Nation States will be very welcoming, even if only from a sense of self-preservation. Just google Catalonia.
CATAPULTS
Other Network State innovations are crypto as currency and the use of the blockchain to record all the data relative to each State and respective citizens. This makes everything much more accurate and secure and the various States and their netizens harder to target by evil governments.
Now, the obvious response is that a state like Venezuela can still try to beat someone up to get that solution, do the proverbial rubber hose attack to get their password and private keys — but first they’ll have to find that person’s offline identity, map it to a physical location, establish that they have jurisdiction, send in the (expensive) special forces, and do this to an endless number of people in an endless number of locations, while dealing with various complications like anonymous remailers, multisigs, zero knowledge, dead-man’s switches, and timelocks. So at a minimum, encryption increases the cost of state coercion. In other words, seizing Bitcoin is not quite as easy as inflating a fiat currency. It’s not something a hostile state like Venezuela can seize en masse with a keypress, they need to go house-by-house.
That does sound very difficult, so it’s nice of them to build actual cities for all these netizens to gather in and thus make it a lot easier for any hostile government to nab a bunch of them at once.🙄 As for all those safeguards, we’re not sure they’ll matter much when you’re getting bits chopped off until you transfer all your assets to an account of said hostile government’s choice. Since most of these city projects are being built in economically and democratically challenged countries, things could get pretty crazy. Because if there’s one thing we learned from The Battle of Polytopia is that there’s always a little viking fucker waiting to show up and ruin your best efforts. Despite all the talk about AI defence projects, these Network State builders look like that player who chose to improve their little settlements with agriculture and windmills, while the next door tribe went straight to forestry and then math to make catapults the better to take over those improved settlements. Think about it, these new cities are dependent on the country’s corrupt central government’s goodwill. Having an independent territory within their borders may seem profitable now, but what about in the future, when these rulers decide they need a popularity boost or simply get fed up with negotiating with a bunch of wealthy outsiders? What’s to stop the corrupt government from sending in the army, kicking their nerdy asses and steal all their stuff?😱
FUTURE?
Where is all this going? Could we be witnessing a rearranging of the global map and a politico-philosophical revolution, or will the Network State just be an embarrassing blip in History? Balaji tries to imbue his concept with grander themes, but it all comes across as a mix of too technical and nonsensical. As excited as he looks when he’s talking about it, Balaji’s Network State is a sterile proposition, with neither intellectual nor emotional appeal. There’s nothing here capable of capturing the world’s imagination and ensure the Network State’s longevity beyond the crypto enclaves that see the blockchain as endlessly fascinating and lose it over the newest meme coin. The dull aesthetic doesn’t help. Come on, grey t-shirts, really? Don’t expect any Network State-inspired porn. As for the tech billionaires funding all the initiatives spawned by Balaji’s dream, between them cozying up to corrupt governments and getting ever more involved with Trump, which may put them on a collision course with Putin, their future seems even more uncertain than the Network State project. Maybe we should start taking bets on who’s going to be the first to get polonium poisoning or end up in one of Bukele’s prisons.
WELCOME TO THE ENCLAVE
Despite our misgivings about the application of the concept of Network State in the physical world, as we currently manage 5 interconnected blogs - 4 public ones + 1 secret one - we believe we control enough digital territory to declare ourselves an Enclave. So, welcome to the Ulthar Enclave, home to snarky, floofy felines, where no plot hole is ignored, indie author dreams go to die in the Pit of Despair, mad laughter can be heard coming from the general direction of the uncharted bog, and black stars hang in the sky. Just don’t tell Blogger.🤫