%% todo move things from the book highlights to here, with numbers %% ## on counter elites page 115, in 2.8 > 77Usually with the help of what Peter Turchin calls counter-elites, high-ranking members of society that are disaligned with the incumbent elites. In a startup’s case the counter-elites would be venture capitalists looking to fund disruption of a big company. In a revolutionary political movement’s case, they’d be disaffected nobles looking for a demographic to champion ## partial failure modes list from page 184, 4.5 >16 A partial list of failure modes: (a) there could be a bug in the code, (b) centralized quantum decryption could come online faster than expected and without decentralized quantum-safe encryption to match, (c) miners could get pressured to censor transactions as Marathon was, (d) ESG attacks could be used against mining, (e) non-pseudonymous developers could be personally targeted, (f) enough BTC might be left on centralized exchanges to freeze it, (g) a Great Firewall-like approach could be used to interfere with Bitcoin at the port/packet level, potentially interfering with the protocol’s implicit assumption of a global, connected, relatively low-latency internet, and so on. I still think Bitcoin can succeed, but my confidence in cryptocurrency is bolstered by the fact that other coins exist with different failure modes. ## nation state systems assumption list page 202 - assumptions of the Nation State System [my summary of list headers] physical first, composition, no terra incognita, no terra nullius, top down division of land, one state per citizen, legitimacy from physical control and electoral choice, centralized administration, domestic monopoly of violence, international sovereignity via military, diplomatic recognition via bilateral and multilateral fora, treaties manage cooperation and constraint, Pax Americana > Legitimacy from physical control and electoral choice. A nation state’s legitimacy comes from a few sources. First, the state needs to be good enough at violence to actually control the territory it claims. Second, but really secondarily, the state is supposedly legitimized by the support of their underlying nation and their demonstrated respect for universal human rights. (It’s unfortunately a secondary point because any group that is in de facto control of territory for long enough eventually gets recognized.) Ideally, a legitimate state reflects the will of its people while also respecting the rights of the individual – giving voice to the masses and the minority alike. ## nation as preceding a state - 5.2.4 micronations and multinations - page 204 > Bidirectionality notwithstanding, the egg of the nation precedes the chicken of the state. From this perspective, a better term than micronation is really microstate, because it’s not a micro-nation unless it represents a small group of aligned people. A single person self-proclaiming a government is just a tiny state. As the saying goes, you and what army? Without a nation, there is no army - and no legitimacy.1 ## 5.2.5 0-nation, 1-nation, N-nations page 204 In between 0-nation microstates and N-nation empires are 1-nation states, governments that are set up to manage the affairs of a single ethnic group in a defined territory. However, while this kind of terminology is not exactly deprecated, it’s a bit old-fashioned. It’s not how we tend to talk about nation states in the current year 205 > First, today we often discuss multiethnic states — multinations, like the USA — which are really more like the empires of yore than a classical monoethnic nation state. Second, many contend that physical borders don’t matter in the age of the internet. Third, modern discourse focuses to a much greater extent on proposition nations, where shared ideas are the organizing principle rather than shared inheritance. Fourth, and most importantly, conflict between ethnic groups within states can result in civil war, mass deportation, totalitarian brainwashing, ethnic cleansing, forced conversion, and cultural destruction, the kind of process that recently resulted in the formations of East Timor and South Sudan. ## page 207 - proposition stages > The Americans, the Singaporeans, and the French: These states have tried, with varying success, to craft a common identity as a “nation” from the raw material of several different ethnic groups. Indeed, the Americans have, by some measures, been very successful in this effort — at least for a time. The Americans, the Singaporeans, and the French are explicitly proposition nations ## page 210 the comparative approach The Comparative Approach How about a comparison? Precisely because they’re so often conflated, it’s worth addressing in detail just how a state differs from a nation. • The state is a political and legal entity, while a nation is a cultural, ethnic, and psychological identity. • The state is bound by laws and threat of force, while a nation is bound by sentiments and linguistic/genetic/cultural alignment. • The state is top-down and hierarchical, while the nation is bottom-up and peerto-peer. • And, as above, the state has a fixed territory, a government and sovereignty over a territory, while a nation typically has shared language, culture, and/or ancestry. ## what is a network state 5.3.1 > Instead, you found a startup society and hope to scale it into a network state that achieves diplomatic recognition from a pre-existing government, just as you don’t found a public company directly, but instead found a startup company and hope to scale it into a public company that achieves “diplomatic recognition” from a pre-existing exchange like the NASDAQ. ## page 221 - proof of alignment > Admission to this social network is selective, people can lose their account privileges for bad behavior, and everyone who’s there has explicitly opted in by applying to join. That application process could involve public proof of alignment via writing, a career history that demonstrates common values, or the investment of time and energy into the society to obtain digital assets. Joining the network that underpins a network state is not a purely economic proposition, not something that can be bought with money alone. It’s a concrete version of Rousseau’s social contract as a literal smart contract, one that all sign before entering, a way to turn an abstract proposition into an actual nation. > The reason we put such a high priority on a moral innovation is that missionary societies outcompete mercenary ones, not just in theory but in practic ## Page 223 - integrated crypto > An integrated cryptocurrency. This is the digital backbone of the network state. It manages the internal digital assets, the smart contracts, the web3 citizen logins, the birth and marriage certificates, the property registries, the public national statistics, and essentially every other bureaucratic process that a nation state manages via pieces of paper. Because it’s protected by encryption, it can coordinate all the functions of a state across the borders of legacy nation states ## page 224 - laws after an organic people > A consensual government limited by a social smart contract. Now we get to the government. Many people make the mistake of thinking the laws (or the land) come first when starting a new state, but laws should only come after the formation of an organic people – of a network nation – not before. That’s because laws encode the implicit understanding of a people. Contra the concept that you “can’t legislate morality”, that’s all you can do: set up laws that reflect the moral consensus of a people as to what is encouraged and discouraged, acceptable and optional, mandatory and forbidden. ## page 226 - digital trials > For example, if someone misbehaves within a given startupsociety-owned jurisdiction, after a Kleros-style digital trial, their deposits could be frozen and their ENS locked out of all doors for a time period as a punishment. ## page 227 proof of human, proof of income - not on anonyminity > But how do you prove that a given startup society really has 10,000 residents and one billion dollars in annual income and 10M square meters in its real estate footprint? Each of these elements can be established via on-chain data. We already have techniques for proof-of-human, proof-of-income (via on-chain accounting) and proof-of-real-estate (via blockchain real estate). ## page 231 - bootstrap recognition > There are many intermediate forms here. We’ll call out two. First, the pre-existing government that first recognizes the network state - the “bootstrap recognizer” - may not be a UN member. It could instead be a city or province. Think about how Wyoming passed a DAO law and Miami’s mayor took a salary in Bitcoin, well before the US government as a whole formally embraced cryptocurrency. Even a positive press release by a city about a fledgling startup society gets it on base, moving them incrementally to the ultimate goal of recognition by sovereign states and eventually membership in the UN (or whatever succeeds it). Second, diplomatic recognition is a negotiation, not a blank check. A sovereign state that recognizes another may revoke that recognition if the second one starts legalizing heroin or becomes a base for terrorism. Or it may just act like it’s revoking recognition, without formally doing so. ## page 232 - 5.3.2 what is the Network-State System? > Terra nullius returns. The network state system further assumes that unclaimed digital territory always exists in the form of new domain names, crypto usernames, plots of land in the metaverse, social media handles, and accounts on new services. ## page 233 - Domestic Monopoly of root access > Domestic monopoly ofroot access. The governance network of a network state has root access to an administrative interface where law enforcement can flip digital switches as necessary to maintain or restore domestic order, just like the sysadmins of today’s tech companies. Of course, postulating the existence of such an interface presupposes a world where everything from money to messaging, doors to dwellings, farms to factories, flying drones to walking droids can be controlled from a single computer — but that world isn’t far off, and today there are few checks on the digital power of the tech companies that are bringing it into being. The network state system checks this power in two ways: by maintaining private keys (so foreign states and corporations cannot interfere in domestic affairs) and by enabling exit (so citizens can execute financial and electoral votes of no confidence if need be, both as individuals and as groups). ### Assumptions > Assumption: Digital Primary, Physical Secondary One point we touched on above, but that bears repeating, is that the network state system assumes the world has flipped to digital first: all nontrivial human-created events start in the cloud and then, if important, are “printed out” into the physical world. Think about anything a human does today: all office work is online, as is much socialization. Courts are now online, as are politicians. So is money. So is agriculture, and manufacturing, and shipping. The phone has indeed become the remote control for the world. Many previously offline devices — cars, doors, desks, weights, coffeemakers, even toothbrushes — are coming online. Even pacemakers leave a digital trace. The physical still exists, of course. There are still physical human beings, there are still physical plots of land, there are still physical rivers and mountains. And for some law enforcement and military functions a network state will need physical robots. But in a network state, everything physical is downstream of lines of code and enforced by cryptography, just as in a nation state, everything physical is downstream of pieces of paper and enforced by the police and military. ## Bottom up assumption of opt in consent > Assumption: Consent and Cryptography Constrain So, in short, in the world of the network state, both states and citizens alike are powered up. Network states have a root dashboard with full access to every digital aspect of the network they govern. They also have security from outside interference because access to these dashboards is gated via private keys rather than passwords. However, this immense digital power is typically deployed nonviolently (unlike with existing states) and constrained by cryptographic and physical exit, rather than by paper laws or toothless treaties. This is what powers up citizens, who freely choose whether to enter or exit, either collectively or individually. Thus, the legitimacy of a network state comes not from top-down declamations, but from bottom-up consent, as each netizen has opted in. A truly oppressive or incompetent network state loses them to exit, or doesn’t gain citizens in the first place. And no state is strong enough to block the ultimate exit that cryptocurrency represents. ## trying to kill the Bowling Alone issue > The network is the nation. The organic, voluntary, bottom-up nation that underpins the state is formed online in a network. This could be on the basis of language, culture, proposition, or some combination thereof. This represents a digital remedy to the phenomenon Putnam identified in Bowling Alone. In the year 2000, we were bowling alone but by 2020 we were posting together. COVID19 accelerated this process — people were spread apart in the physical world but packed together online ## all is downstream from code > But in a network state, everything physical is downstream of lines of code and enforced by cryptography, just as in a nation state, everything physical is downstream of pieces of paper and enforced by the police and military. Hegel talks about this ## in 5.3.6 What is a (National) Network? - page 241 > Assuming you could get access to a global dataset like Facebook or Twitter’s network (or scrape it), you could turn all philosophical disputes about what a nation is into simply a set of parameter choices. That means a nation is a subnetwork in a global social graph. ## Network Union - 5.3.8 How is a Network State Founded? > network union is a social graph organized in a tree-like structure with a leader, a purpose, a crypto-based financial and messaging system, and a daily call-to-action. It’s the underpinning of the new nation behind a network state ## 246 - Public displays of alignment > All of these are examples of public multi-party coordination where people are creating art together in a high-trust society. The coordination is pleasing to the eye. But it also indicates to the audience that the people involved have practiced before, that they’re aligned, that they aren’t all playing whatever notes they want at whatever time, that there is some pre-arranged give and take. Public displays of positive-sum attention show that two or more people can work together as a team. ## 5.3.9 Why Would we Found a Network State? > Moreover, these structures are far more democratic than the coercive governance structures of the legacy system, because they’re all opt-in. 100% of members of a network union or network state have chosen to be there, rather than 51% imposing their will on a reluctant 49%. Network states are models for 100% democracy, not merely 51% democracy. his tweets on this https://archive.ph/OWZ52 ## 5.3.12 What Technological Developments enable Network States? > Venture capitalists are fond of asking the “why now” question to entrepreneurs. Why now? Why can we contemplate founding network states today, and not 5 or 10 or 20 years ago? What’s changed in the world? ### Reliance on Starlink > Remote and Starlink open up the map. The moment something is put on the internet, it becomes remote friendly. And everything is going on the internet. Moreover, remote doesn’t just mean around the corner, it means around the world. Starlink, and satellite broadband more generally, powers up remote further, by making huge swaths of the map newly economically feasible. Nothing now prevents a sufficiently motivated digital community from setting up their own Burning Man equivalent in the middle of nowhere, except this time for permanent habitation, and with an eye towards incorporating formal towns and and cities. This complements our earlier point: through the internet, we’re reopening the frontier, and making previously godforsaken areas of the map much more attractive. Unlike past eras, you don’t no longer need to be near a port or mine to build a city; you just need to be near an internet connection.