What do I think about network states?

The truly interesting stuff is the governance innovation: using network states to organize in ways that would actually not be possible under existing regulations. 

[2] is exciting because it fixes a major problem in politics: unlike startups, where the early stage of the process looks somewhat like a mini version of the later stage, in politics the early stage is a public discourse game that often selects for very different things than what actually work in practice. 

If governance ideas are regularly implemented in network states, then we would move from an extrovert-privileging "talker liberalism" to a more balanced "doer liberalism" where ideas rise and fall based on how well they actually do on a small scale. 

But blockchains are the only infrastructure system that at least attempts to do ultimate dispute resolution at the non-state level (either through on-chain smart contract logic or through the freedom to fork). This makes them an ideal base infrastructure for network states.

They combine the love of freedom of team BTC with the moral energy of team NYT and the organization of team CCP, and give us the best benefits of all three (plus a level of international appeal greater than any of the three) and avoid the worst parts.

But we also need to go a level deeper. Blockchains and network states have the shared property that they are both trying to "create a new root". 

These values are implemented in a very libertarian and tech-forward way, organizing not around land, history, ethnicity and country, but around the cloud and personal choice, but they are rightist values nonetheless. 

You can find a bunch more juicy examples in the chapter titled, appropriately, "If the News is Fake, Imagine History". 

The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns The New York Times Company, owned slaves but didn't report that fact in their 1619 coverage.