The Network State
Ch. 1 - Quickstart
- Number of countries with population
- 100M+: 14 countries
- 10-100M: 74 countries
- 1-10M: 67 countries
- Less than 1M: 38 countries
- The network state takes the most robust existing tech stack we have
Ch. 2 - History as Trajectory
Prologue, Microhistory and Macrohistory, Political Power and Technological Truth, God-State-Network
- Some platform companies are dependent on the macrohistory. Macrohistory makes money.
- E.g., Uber drivers and their star ratings
- Blockchain is an immediatist model of history because ‘the past’ is with us at every second. History is connected.
- Even after 51%-attack, people can create before-attack forked chain and keep using that fork instead
- I.e., humans are creative.
- Figure out the Network way of doing something, without going through the State
- God-Network synthesis (e.g., the Jewish diaspora before Israel)
- “What would the people you respect advise in your situation?”
- A private board of directors
- Digitizing history doesn’t mean throwing away everything and returning to the caveman era of a blank git repository
- History is the analysis of the log files
- With each fork as contingent points
[It’s not editable because history isn’t repeatable; it doesn’t exist separately because history is connected; ]
- “The moment you write about any societal problem in depth you’ll find yourself writing a history of that problem.”
- Historical/moral/ethical angle might be the missing ingredient to build startup societies
- ”He who controls the past controls the future”
S - 松岡正剛『情報の歴史を読む』(20240329)
- A group of people who doesn’t know who they are and where they came from won’t make it to the moon or Mars
- Migration is as powerful a way to change the law under which you live as election
S - Balaji 1, with Tim Ferriss (20240325)
[Vote by ballot, wallet, and foot]
- Invert, always invert
- The diaspora is the state
- Ideas have timing
- From both Lenski model and Idea Maze model
- Evolution doesn’t care about lifetime of each individual gene-meme carrier (its sample is beyond your own experience and any human lifetime)
- Purpose beats for-profit
- Focus on a single moral innovation
- Power care about its past because the former derives from the latter
S - 松岡正剛『情報の歴史を読む』(20240329)
- Societies benefit by passing down scientific and technological knowledge without distortion [IN A WAY, NOT CREATIVE]
- A technical truth is true even if no human believes it to be true (Constructor Theory)
- You wouldn’t steal
- Because of God in the 1800s
- Because of the States in the 1900s
- However, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems
- Encryption increases the cost of state coercion
- Because the Network won’t let you in the 2000s
- Books = Music = Movies
- Stocks = Bonds = Gold = Loans = Art
- As credits and debits on blockchains
- Every polity will be publicly traded eventually just like companies and coins
People of God, People of the State, People of the Network
If the News is Fake, Imagine History
Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning
Left is the New Right is the New Left
The One Commandment
Ch. 3
NYY, CCP, BTC
The Dated and the Timeless
- A similar tripolar configuration has happened before
- NYT, CCP, BTC = the Soviet, the Nazis, the Americans
A Bipolar America and a Tripolar Triangle
Moral Power, Martial Power, Money Power
Submission, Sympathy, Sovereignty
Conflicts and Alliances
- Americans and people overseas are hit by inflation and are unlikely to be enthusiastic for the stability and supremacy of the dollar
Ch. 4 - Decentralization, Recentralization
The Possible Futures, Sociopolitical Axes, Technoeconomic Axes
- An alternative to US, crypto-anarchy, and China
- International Intermediate
- The rest of the world will need to lead
- Volatility is good for insurgents (idiosyncratic disruptors) and bad for incumbents (legacy institutions)
- The former only need to get lucky once
- Social media is social volatilityvolatility
S - Balaji 1, with Tim Ferriss (20240325)
[Relate to ‘Increase surface area of luck’]
- Cryptocurrency is financial volatilityvolatility
- The only certainty is rising volatilityvolatility
- The internet means hitherto unconnected nodes being met and connected peer-to-peer
- Downside: a Twitter mob
- Upside: ETH Research
- Don’t be the seaside towns not ready for a thousand year flood
- What does natively digital news look like?
- Dashboards > newspapers
- On-chain event feeds > Twitter > newspapers
- Unbundle, Rebundle
- Millions more playlists than albums, millions more Twitter feeds than newspapers
- Surface contingency and arbitrariness via flexible bundles
- International Indians in the 2020s might do what China did in the 2010s
- Remember: ecosystems develop very slowly, and then all at once
- [It won’t be Indian market but Indian network (cryptocurrencies via blockchains)]
- [Network over market - because not everything can be price tagged]
- Think of Farza, Furqan, Lipsync guy, and AI music guy from buildspace network
- Network defects because it implies both a failure and a political defection
- Humans might be the limiting factor with regard to the productivity mystery
- Government statistics are manipulation-prone (shadow statistics)
- China’s COVID death figures
- SF crime rate
- US inflation
- Soviet’s report on harvest in Ukraine
- The Identity Stack
- The collection of all that defines someone and its rank order
- To build something great means becoming someone’s top primary identifier
- Gorbachev’s glasnost (free speech) and perestroika (free market)
- Internet is to the USA what the USA was to the USSR
Foreseeable Futures
- Digital world is still constrained by the laws of physics, but is primarily run by human-written code
- Algorithms and databases > physics and biology
- Crypto makes macroeconomics an experimental subject
- You can set your own monetary policy!
- The marketplace operator has huge control in shaping incentives and thus Hayekian order does not always come about
Victory Conditions and Surprise Endings
- China can potentially realize abstractions such as “the economy” and “the supply chain”
- Remember how “six degrees of separation” and “written history” became real with social networks
- Maybe such a system can solve Hayekian calculation problem
- Remember Uber beat Sidecar because the former had a global view of supply & demand better and riders wanted speed not price shopping
- 大東亜共栄圏 2.0
- The only reliable soldiers will be robot because you can neither propagandize (e.g., via NYT) nor incentivize (e.g., via BTC) them
Towards a Recentralized Center
- Recentralization is a cycle back to centralization from one vantage point but a step forward from another
- Current information explosion = the Reformation (the Protestants, the Lutherans, and then the Baptists had to attract people to their interpretations)
Ch. 5
Why Now?
- Mapmaking + Print capitalism = State formation
On Nation States
On Network States