The Network State: How To Start a New Country

So, how could someone in the future (or even the present) know if a particular event they didn’t directly observe was real? The Bitcoin blockchain gives one answer. It is the most rigorous form of history yet known to man, a history that is technically and economically resistant to revision.

In short, once we see that a tech founder builds a startup company to effect economic change, and a political activist builds a social movement to effect moral change, we can see how the startup societies we describe in this work combine aspects of both.

History tells you who’s in charge. Why did Orwell say that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past? Because history textbooks are written by the winners. They are authored, subtly or not, to tell a story of great triumph by the ruling establishment over its past enemies.

The key idea is to populate the land from the cloud, and do so all over the earth. Unlike an ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which packs millions of disputants in one place, a network state is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying s

You want to recruit producers, not consumers, and for that, you’ll need a purpose.

People have talked about zombie Reaganism, but in this scenario a new coalition would be finally popping into view. And it’s a totally different carving of the political spectrum than the Reagan era. Rather than nationalists and capitalists (the right) against internationalists and socialists (the left), it’s internationalists and capitalists (left

Because they don’t think about cycles, they don’t think about curves. They live on a kind of Flatland, except rather than being flat as in the sense of two-dimensional, it’s flat as in the sense of a curve with zero-derivative. But as Ray Dalio has noted, things may not stay flat in historical terms for long. As such, the blue and red statists may

All of this is true. Nevertheless, a key realization for a tech founder should be that a significant fraction of people want moral progress. Just as much as the technologist wants to get to Mars, a large chunk of society wants to feel like the good guys fighting in some grand cause. And if you don’t give them that cause, they’ll make one up, and/or

The point is that in any holy war, the left is the word, and the right is the sword. It’s the priest and the warrior; you need both.