We need network societies, not network states
Divya Siddarth, Glen Weyl, Anne-Marie Slaughter
Balaji Srinivasan aspires to be the John Locke of the Digital Age. His book, The Network State (TNS), puts forth a new social contract enabled by “Web3 technology,” centered on blockchains. In a sentence, he defines the network state (NS) as a startup country—“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.”
The book is slapdash but sincere. It is also a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and endorsed by a bevy of Silicon Valley titans. Readers tempted to ignore it as a fringe polemic do so at their peril: Srinivasan has crystalized a strand of post-libertarian thinking that is shaping much of the technology industry. His inspiration, a 1997 book by British authors William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson entitled The Sovereign Individual, argues for a world in which nation-states crumble in the face of digital innovation, leaving the masses scrambling in impoverished chaos while the global elite build a real, tax-free meritocracy in cyberspace. TNS updates this classic tech fantasy with a sprinkling of ruler-and-ruled feudalism, reviving traditional hierarchies while wrapping itself in the mantle of futurism. The future looks like Evan McKenzie’s “privatopias”, an archipelago of gated communities run on private provision ruled by the wealthy few, bleeding public infrastructure dry as collective capacity erodes for the unfortunate many.
Srinivasan’s gospel is one of exitocracy: an ideology centered around the idea of exiting or “taking one’s business elsewhere”. Such an ideology is ripe for a global moment of polarization, paralysis, frustration and fear. Many agree that their current political-economic systems are not working for them and have little trust in their ability to effect change within those systems through democratic processes. Moreover, the nation-state is an awkward vehicle for solving many of our problems, which cut across and within nations, like the Internet or AI, climate change and the spread of diseases to be contained and cured. TNS models necessary experimentation in the form and function of what John Dewey called “new publics”, and rightly holds that emerging technology can and should empower such social imagination, just as the development of the printing press opened the door to imagining and realizing the mass democracies of the 19th century.
This makes it particularly ironic that Srinivasan’s solution is so backwards-looking. Exit is a necessary right, but it requires something to exit to. What we get here is less Star Trek and more Game of Thrones. He imagines states composed of a tight knit community committed to a single, sharp “one commandment” (e.g. strict dietary rules), ruled by a founder-king and enforced by a blockchain-enforced contract to monitor adherence to both. Exitocracy preserves ideological alignment, rendering voice in democracy unnecessary—the assumption is that those unhappy with the dictats of one feudal lord would simply find another.
Here Srinivasan builds on the libertarianism that has characterized past decades of Silicon Valley: a deep distrust of the state and an antipathy to regulation, welfare, public goods, social justice, and any supporters of these causes. But he explicitly recognizes the core flaw of this worldview: collective endeavors require sacrifice for the common good, sacrifices that purely atomized individuals optimizing for their self-interest will not make. His solution is a turn towards enforced morality, requiring a quasi- religious attachment to values that separate a network state from the world outside. Little wonder, then, that Srinivasan allies himself closely with the self-titled “neoreactionary” movement funded by his mentor Peter Thiel, which advocates for the erosion of democracy in favor of “American monarchy”.
But the power of networks is found in embracing and organizing the complexity of our shared lives, not in these impoverished constraints towards homogeneity and hierarchy. As one of us has argued, “Openness encapsulates the distinctive logic of networks”, accommodating “the participation of the many rather than the few and deriving power from that participation.” Paired with technological advances across blockchain and artificial intelligence, a true embrace of networks could help build a future of abundant public goods, coordination, and collective intelligence that can erode our reliance on the rigid administrative bureaucracies that have largely survived little changed from the era of ink and paper. We can look forward to many things in a future where the power of distributed networks are much more central to our collective lives. Deeply atomized digital theocratic fiefs are far from the most promising.
The One-Commandment State
Srinivasan concedes that, like billion-dollar companies, network states should and will not emerge fully-formed. Instead he lays out a network state lifecycle, beginning with an active online community that might then transition to a network union that would engage in collective actions. The next step would be to transition to a network archipelago owning physical territory distributed across jurisdictions, which would then finally secure diplomatic recognition as a sovereign network state. Blockchains—open, transparent, immutable—form the technological backbone of each iteration.
TNS sees the central social problems of our time as state surveillance, rigid financial institutions, malign and manipulative media, and overregulation of technological progress. Srinivasan is convinced that blockchains can overcome all of these problems. They can provide censorship-resistance to the state, decentralization and automation of the financial system, immutable answers to the media, and the foundation for a new technological ecosystem.
If blockchains are the central technology of network states, the One Commandment is their ideological core. The Commandment is the sociopolitical equivalent of the kind of “brand promise” that might attract users to a startup: a single, core ‘moral innovation’ that will draw citizens to a startup network state. Examples Srinivasan provides include “keto kosher” (a network state organized around the banning of sugar) and “biofreedom” (an anti-FDA network state organized around the right to develop and consume any biological product). These single Commandments aim to be organizing principles for communities and eventually new constitutions, distinguishing network states from mere social networks.
Users (Srinivasan uses the word interchangeably with “citizens”) would join network states or their earlier-stage incarnations by signing a “social smart contact” with their cryptographic “private key,” putting in escrow digital or digitally encoded physical assets in return for joining the network state. This arrangement would give founder-rulers and their engineers “root access to an administrative interface where law enforcement can flip digital switches as necessary to maintain or restore domestic order.” English translation: the ruler could, in theory, seize any user/citizen’s assets to punish or prevent actions that violate the Commandment, as the ruler interprets it.
Exit is thus asymmetric: while insisting on an absolute right of exit from existing nation states, Srinivasan imagines all sorts of property being automatically under the control of new digital lords, who should have the capacity to “surveil, deplatform, freeze, and sanction”, simply to keep up with what he sees as the default state for existing nation-states. We should not be concerned by the potential for founder-king overreach, however, because in the world of network states, politics would disappear: 51% democracy would become a 100% democracy as citizens choose the One Commandment that they want to rule their lives.
Srinivasan hopes to leave behind a great many evils that he attributes to the 51% democracy he seeks to escape. His favorite polemical enemy is the “sophisticated evil” of wokism. His hatred of the New York Times, which he identifies as “controlling the [American] state,” leaps off the page. He sees the Times as one of three defining world powers, along with Bitcoin/crypto and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet, he seems to have even less patience for the values of small c conservatives; while he resents wokism, he at least actively responds to it, while values such as national patriotism, religion, economic solidarity and family ties are dismissed as hardly worthy of consideration. After all, any of these countervailing forces might prevent full-throated support of the One Commandment. In Srinivasan’s view, if you and your family don’t agree on politics, or if your children end up not wanting to spend their days in anti-FDA or keto-land, then you probably wouldn’t want to share a state with them.
Who Moves to Lineland?
All this leaves one wondering precisely who would populate network states? To whom is this vision targeted? Write off all religious believers, anyone with a strong focus on equality, democracy or social justice, anyone with a strong attachment to physical place, family, nationality/patriotism, and anyone lacking the economic resources to acquire property and thus purchase membership. The remainder is at most 1% of the world population.
Yet even this small slice of “citizens of nowhere” as Theresa May labeled them, a class from which readers of both TNS and this magazine are mostly drawn, seems a very odd candidate for membership in network states. How many would prioritize their desire for a “keto kosher” lifestyle over, for example, their attachment to workplaces, their interest in public art, their preference for a tropical climate, etc? And would those who do actually find greater alignment in a community of others who share this monomania than among co-ethnics, co-religionists, family, etc? Those who would, and there must be some, would seem quite unusual, even extreme, in their focus on diet to the exclusion of everything else, making them particularly challenging citizens.
Historical experience suggests that an ideology that could inspire the devotion necessary to create a network state would be much deeper seated and/or totalizing. Liberia was founded by former American slaves who sought to “colonize” Africa to escape from racial oppression; Utah was settled by Mormons with markedly different lifestyles fleeing persecution; Israel was the “hope of 2000 years” of Jewish history; more recently, the Islamic State is arguably the closest analog to the network state. While readers will differ in their appraisals of the outcomes of these experiments, it seems unlikely that dietary or pharmaceutical policies alone would be sufficient to match the zeal and sacrifice they required. Today that zeal would require, in Srinivasan’s vision, decades of peaceful land purchases and negotiations with the dozens of nation states that would have to consent to excise parts of their own territories and recognize them as part of a network state. Perhaps the closest example of an independence movement focused around an abstract One Commandment was the US Confederacy and its attachment to a particular (pre-digital) form of property, though this example is unlikely to recommend network states to most reformers.
What are Networks for?
At the root of such paradoxes is Srinivasan’s fundamental misunderstanding of the networks he pays homage to. He writes, “Every doctrine has its Leviathan, that prime mover who hovers above all. For a religion, it is God. For a political movement, it is the State. And for a cryptocurrency, it is the Network.” Yet networks were not originally and are not primarily a technology; instead they are a way of seeing the world that technologies can be built to mimic, a way of seeing the world that is precisely contrary to the simplistic reductionism Srinivasan finds so invigorating and clarifying.
Decades before the construction of the first precursors to the internet, social, physical and biological scientists began to use networks to move beyond the simplistic models of discrete and infrequently interacting atoms. Quantum physics replaced the simple billiard balls of classical mechanics with complex partially entangled patterns of particles. Ecology and systems biology enriched simplistic theories of “survival of the fittest” by highlighting the network of symbiotic relationships and ecosystem services that determine the success of ever higher levels of life. Modern neuroscience, and the work in artificial intelligence that builds off it, replaced traditional accounts based on logical deduction with “connectionism”, where intelligence emerges from networks of simple but adaptable interactions of neurons.
Perhaps most profoundly, social thinkers like Georg Simmel and John Dewey harnessed networks to understand the defining features of urban and technological modernity. Simmel argued that individuality emerges from social complexity, as tribal societies with overlapping social circles (work, religion, family etc.) give way to individuals who form the unique intersection of the social worlds they inhabit. Dewey argued that the patterns of commerce and sociality created by novel technologies (e.g. radio and the automobile) would require the creation of “new publics” that could democratically govern these activities in ways that nation states were poorly aligned to do. In many ways, the original vision for the internet proposed by JCR Licklider, a psychologist who acted as the program officer for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was to build technology capable of mimicking these complex interactional patterns. Where previous communication systems, like Ma Bell, were built on central, bureaucratic switchboards, the ARPANET would run on open, interoperable protocols, creating a “network of networks” that would allow locally governed systems to cooperate at progressively larger scales.
This agenda led to perhaps the most profound communications revolution in human history. Yet as early as 1979 when the TCP/IP protocol was just beginning to emerge, Licklider saw that these communications protocols would achieve only a small part of the potential of the “network society” he envisioned, because they lacked support for fundamental functions of trust, identity and sharing of scarce resources. Absent such support embedded in fundamental protocols, Licklider projected, the transformative potential of networks for social organization would be captured and ultimately impeded by unaccountable and often monopolistic corporate interests. While he imagined IBM rather than Google and Meta as the bête noire, this prediction is now widely seen as coming true. One of us has spent much of her career documenting the emergence, along with the internet, of networked patterns of subnational, supra-national and cross-national governance; yet there too the lack of transparency and clear standards of democratic accountability has led to charges of elitism, technocracy, and illegitimacy from the people, organizations, and states that are excluded.
Network Society
Many of our biggest problems are in the world of atoms, not in the world of bits. We need more housing, more effective education systems, more resilient supply chains, electoral systems that effectively represent far more diverse societies, and better pathways to comfortable, meaningful, and sustainable lives across the globe. Exit may be tempting. But it’s not the way to build.
Instead, imagine empowering groups within and across countries to address the pressing problems they face, build legitimacy and win public support to force their many governments to the table to grapple with their creative solutions. Imagine collective intelligence systems that apply the capacities of new language models towards achieving participatory consensus at nation-state or global scale, building on existing work in places like Taiwan or Estonia, and on digital platforms like Wikipedia. Or imagine tools that empower zero-overhead organizations to fund abundant public goods, not relying either purely on the state or private venture capital, but dynamically allocating from networks of philanthropists, VCs, and governments matching individual contributions based on the breadth and diversity of support. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) hosted in the Ethereum blockchain community point towards ways to do this, from matching grants for shared public goods, to retroactive funding, delegative democracy, and many other innovative sandboxes.
The promise of Web3, paired with other technologies of the future, stretches well beyond the specific technology of blockchain. If there is success to be found here, it is in rewiring economic incentives and growing new networks to layer over the old. This might look like advances in privacy and cryptography that can enable different forms of information sharing, machine learning, and auditing. Or economic and political mechanisms, including new auctions and voting rules, that can better express the actual value of a good or service, beyond the crude mechanism of price. Or a (finally) better way to process, share, and retain collective rights over the data we all create, which is now mostly hoovered up by private platforms or AI companies without clear paths to collective benefit. The experiments that have been run by the Collective Intelligence Project, the Plurality Institute, and countless others show that this future is possible.
If alignment around One Commandment, exit and founders are at the center of Srinivasan’s vision of the network state, pluralism, inter-coordination, fluid recombination and participatory governance are at the center of a network society. While he sees networks as a tool to establish a new order that doesn't require them (who needs a network when you have a single, perfectly aligned community?), networks are at the core of imagining and thriving in a network society. Where he seeks to recruit “citizens of nowhere” to anchor themselves to a new singular identity, we see everyone as being, in different ways, citizens of many communities (e.g. nations, employers, religions) and seek to build systems that can represent these intersectional affiliations to enable accountability previous social systems only empowered for simplistic, singular identities. Where he seeks new sovereignties and independence for thousands of fragmented statelets, we see no conflict between increasingly empowering local (in terms of interests, and not just geography) communities to manage their own affairs and coordinating increasingly globally to address challenges like climate change and pandemics. For the true adherents of a network society, there is no “right scale” of governance; everything is part of a pattern of intersecting, diverse and partially cooperative systems.
TNS poses the crucial problem of our time: how to harness networks to reimagine our political and social systems and make them fit for the 21st century. Yet its answer looks backwards and undermines the very networks it seeks to leverage. We don’t need to choose between reaction and stasis. A brighter future, truer to the richness of our diversely shared lives, could in fact await. But not through network states.
